Many a true word 189
You’d put this down as a slip of the tongue, but when it came in the middle of an extended bout of bodyswerving John Mackay’s straightforward question about a referendum on Trident, maybe Kezia Dugdale really was just saying what she meant.
The suicide note 220
Earlier today Gordon Brown gave a speech in London, on a subject and for reasons which are unclear. It was widely trailed in the press, however, as an intervention in the Labour leadership campaign, with the particular goal of stopping Jeremy Corbyn from winning. It was – naturally – broadcast live and in full by the BBC News channel.
Corbyn wasn’t mentioned by name so far as we noticed, but to tell the truth we drifted in and out of the rambling, 49-minute, 30-page monologue full of celebrity namedrops and unconnected anecdotes, hypnotised as we were by Brown’s relentless pacing up and down the room like a caged animal.
Nobody who isn’t getting paid should have to endure the entire grimness of it, so using the magic of technology we’ve compressed it all down to a mere fraction of its length (just 20%) for you, but without losing any of the tone, content or intellectual nuance.
We offer it to you as an elegy. It marks the day that Labour reanimated the walking corpse of the only person left in the party that it considers to have any gravitas – not to win an election, but to try to crush the first man in living memory to enthuse tens of thousands of new members to join a political party in the hope of restoring the values it was created to uphold.
It is the day the soul of the Labour Party finally died.
We have taken this out of context 61
But you have to admit it has a ring of truth about it.
(From tonight’s Scotland 2015.)
She lives by the river 147
Michelle Mone, the fake-tan-and-diet-pills tycoon who threatened to leave Scotland if the SNP won the 2007 Holyrood election (but didn’t when they did), then threatened to leave if Yes won the referendum (but did when it didn’t), now lives in a very expensive flat by the Thames in London with a lovely view of Tower Bridge.
And boy, does she ever want you to know about it.
A natural progression 215
They think we forget 56
Just two things 167
The voice of tolerance 153
The website of the Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland says:
So who’d like to see the Order tolerating and defending other people’s ideals in a double-page spread from the latest edition of their house journal, The Orange Torch?
Scotland’s Embarrassment 127
The Daily Record has a major editorial in today’s edition bleating piteously about the way David Mundell and the Conservative government have – to everyone’s complete and utter astonishment, except not so much – ignored the wishes of almost all the MPs elected by the Scottish people just two months ago and blocked every single amendment to the Scotland Bill.
The picture above, by alert reader Neil Hepburn, seems to sum the situation up.





















