WHATEVER gossamer-thin strands of credibility John Swinney clung to as First Minister surely snapped the minute he was rumbled for having tea with Eric Trump.
You know, the son of Donald Trump? The same US President John says should be banned from coming to Britain.
Eric Trump after his meeting with John Swinney last week[/caption]
The US President’s son flew in to Edinburgh on the Trump jet[/caption]
John Swinney had tried to cover up his double-dealing with the Trumps[/caption]
Seriously, you couldn’t put a red neck on our inglorious leader with a blowtorch.
The guy’s trying to take us all for idiots.
Except that he doesn’t have the foresight to realise that there’s nothing he can do that won’t be found out.
In this case, Swinney covered up his double-dealing by getting spin doctors to tell journalists that it had just been “an ordinary meeting” before being forced to admit that he had in fact entertained Trump Jr at his official Bute House residence and that it was about “business” not politics.
As if there’s a difference where that family of carpetbaggers are concerned.
Will Nic be able to honestly admit unhappy legacy?
SHE lost the love of the man who’d helped make her what she was.
She lost her husband, too, along the way.
She flogged the dead horse of an obsession with independence when the country needed her to fight so many issues that mattered so much more.
She drove a wedge between Yes and No, between Holyrood and Westminster, between members of her own party. Somehow, a woman who should have been a role model to half the planet even managed to make women hate other women.
Then she walked away when all around her was crumbling and left it in the hands of men who couldn’t mend a fuse, never mind a nation’s infrastructure.
It all sounds terribly harsh when written down this way.
Yet it has to be said. It has to be recorded that Nicola Sturgeon’s legacy is not a happy one.
And as she begins her long goodbye to politics, you have to wonder if she really does believe it’s been worth it.
The scrutiny, the pain, the criticism and the derision, the invasion of her personal life and her finances, the very public erosion of her marriage; can she possibly step back from it all with a nod of satisfaction that she leaves behind a better country than the one she inherited?
I just don’t see how that’s possible, not if she’s honest with the only person who matters: Herself.
The cross-bench sniping in the primary school playground that is Holyrood? Who cares, it’s all just a game to them.
If she’d cured Covid and personally filled in every pothole in the land, the Labour and the Tories would still have found a way to demean her, because that’s what the political classes do.
Nicola Sturgeon has confirmed she will not stand again as an MSP[/caption]
To be honest, it doesn’t even matter what it says in her memoirs once they hit the shelves this August, because they’re bound to concentrate on her successes — or, at very least, on how her failures were all other people’s fault.
But one day, when it’s all over and it’s someone else’s turn in the barrel, you wonder how deep the regrets will cut. You wonder how differently she might wish she’d done it all.
I mean, imagine how differently she might be remembered had her reaction to losing the 2014 Referendum been to win over the 55 per cent who voted ‘No’ one by one, rather than branding them as enemies and locking herself in an echo chamber of unquestioning support. For me, that set the tone for her leadership, a regime where we were either with her or against her, where it was either My Way Or The Highway.
She always seemed either unable — or, more likely, unwilling — to debate, to convince, to sway. Instead, she chose to berate and belittle and, the longer she persisted with this bombastic way of being, the more both inside and outside the Nationalist tent seemed to turn against her.
Never was this thrown into sharper relief than on the issue of gender identity, a hugely complex and sensitive subject affecting the mental and physical health of so many today, but one which she managed to reduce (if you’ll pardon the pun) to absolute binary status; as in, you either agreed with her views or you were a Neanderthal bigot.
This lost the SNP a hugely intelligent, experienced and influential figure in Joanna Cherry, drummed out of the gang for daring to argue that maybe it wasn’t as straightforward as agreeing that a man who identified as a woman was in fact a woman and vice-versa.
Footie gangs at risk to city
IF the level of policing we saw in Glasgow on Sunday is what it takes to make an Old Firm game go off even reasonably peacefully, it begs two huge questions.
What if the number of cops drafted in to keep a lid on the madness still isn’t enough one of these days?
And, even more importantly, what if another major incident happens in the city while the force’s attention is focused so completely on one football stadium?
Both have to be huge concerns for top brass, who piled so many uniforms into Rangers’ match against Celtic that you wondered if there was anyone left on the beat across the country’s biggest city.
Their presence in and around Parkhead had to be seen to be believed, an overkill that showed just how scared they are of these poisonous fixtures spiralling out of control amidst a new era of sinister gangs fuelled by drugs as well as drink.
That close on 100 halfwits from either side missed the game because they refused to remove balaclavas or allow themselves to be searched for weapons, pyrotechnics and more tells of the agenda they arrive with and the issues cops deal with.
However, for all that Police Scotland will justify the number of officers involved, the length of time they were on duty for and the cost of it all, that second question really does matter: How would they cope in the event of a serious road accident, a large-scale fire or worse that needed every pair of boots on the scene?
Here’s hoping against hope we never have to find out.
It led to impossible situations such as that involving rapist Adam Graham, now known as Isla Bryson, who was switched from a female to a male jail because no one had sat down in advance and properly worked out where offenders like he/she belonged.
It took us to the place discussed in this column a few weeks back, where a nurse who disagreed with a trans doctor using a female changing room ended up facing the sack at a disciplinary hearing, again partly because no one sat both sides down to talk their problems out.
Incredibly, almost satirically, it then brought us to last weekend at Holyrood, where a woman attending a debate on women’s rights was ordered to remove a T-shirt with the words Women’s Rights on it.
For me, all of this stems from Nicola Sturgeon’s need to turn everything into a fight, a split, a them-and-us barney.
Her fallout with mentor and one-time idol Alex Salmond — check out old pictures of them together, see how she looked at him — remained unresolved when he passed away last autumn. She didn’t even try to win over a single one of those ‘No’ voters.
She insisted that all Scotland’s successes were down to her party and all our problems were down to the Tories.
Her determination to do whatever PM Boris Johnson didn’t do during Covid, combined with a need to micro-control our every movement even once the pandemic was over, made the experience all the more unpleasant.
Throw in the state of our NHS, or our schools, the fact that we pay more tax than England for inferior services, the scandal of those bloody ferries and . . . well, you get the picture.
I genuinely wish Nicola Sturgeon well with whatever the future holds.
But let’s not go sugar-coating the role she played in our past and our present.
