Scotland

Good heavens. Just when you think events north of the border can’t get any more ridiculous, they do. Now it has emerged that the director of an, er, hardcore porn project managed to secure £85,000 from government-backed Creative Scotland in January. The production, directed by Leonie Rae Gasson and titled ‘Rein’, was set to involve ‘pornographic processes’ to film in the Highlands, while research for the project included a nine-minute sexually explicit film that aims to take viewers on a ‘magical, erotic journey through a distinctly Scottish landscape’. What's more, recruitment ads for Rein, which offered a daily fee of £270 for 'hardcore' acts, were advertised on the websites of publicly-funded arts groups.

Back to the curious case of Michael Matheson and his £11,000 iPad bill. Despite desperate attempts by the former health secretary to stall the publication of a report into his behaviour — after Matheson tried to lump taxpayers with his ruinous roaming charges — the verdict is in. It has now been revealed that the disgraced ex-minister did indeed breach the MSP code of conduct.  Matheson's rule-breaking charges come after he was deemed to fall short on parliamentary standards and for improper — to put it mildly — use of expenses. The investigation results, released today by the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body (SPCB), come ahead of the publication of the full report in its entirety.

Jason Leitch was a calm, reassuring presence in his almost daily TV appearances during the pandemic. But after an unedifying evidence session at the UK Covid Inquiry and revelations that Leitch deleted his Covid WhatsApps, the reputation of the national clinical director is in tatters. Now, he has announced his departure from his Scottish government role and will leave at the end of April. The former dental surgeon was widely regarded as affable and straightforward. His skills as a communicator were huge valuable at a time of great uncertainty. He regularly stood alongside former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon during her lunchtime broadcasts to the nation, offering the scientific rationale for the decisions made by politicians.

It's a day that ends in 'y' which means the leader of the SNP is once again harping on about independence. Today Humza Yousaf addressed a crowd at the the London School of Economics about the economic woes of Brexit and how, surprise surprise, 'achieving independence' is the only solution for the people of Scotland. Yousaf started jovially, pointing out that both his host Emma McCoy and interviewer Iain Begg had Caledonian ties. 'It just reminds me of that famous saying that there are two types of people in the world: Scots and those who want to be Scottish. There is a third, of course,' he quipped, 'those who lack any ambition whatsoever, but we shall look over those individuals.' A rather ironic dig from a leader who has himself achieved, er, not a great deal...

As yet another day passes, the good people of Scotland remain in suspense about the outcome of the police probe into the SNP. The three-year long investigation — which has seen multiple arrests, the impounding of a £110,000 campervan, a military-style raid of SNP HQ and the construction of a rather large forensic tent outside the Dear Leader’s own home  — has still not concluded.  In fact, witnesses are being interviewed for the, er, fourth time as police attempt to get to the bottom of fraud claims relating to purchases of a £95,000 electric Jaguar to gardening equipment and women’s razors.  And it now transpires that there is one very particular line of questioning that the police are focusing their efforts on.

The Chancellor will be anxiously preparing himself this evening for tomorrow's papers, waiting to see how his Budget lands. He won’t need to wait quite as long to hear how his own party members have received it, however. And the verdict is already in from the Scottish Tories. It isn't good. Jeremy Hunt's decision to extend the energy profits levy, which taxes the profits of oil and gas companies, to 2029 has left Scotland’s Tory MPs furious. Never mind bad press, might the Chancellor have inadvertently landed a Tory rebellion in Sunak’s in-tray? Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross was the first to hit out by announcing that he will not vote with the government to pass the legislation.

The SNP seems determined not to stick to the day job of actually running the country. Scotland's government this week launched a publication called 'Building a New Scotland: an independent Scotland’s Place in the World'. It set out policies for something that doesn't exist – an independent Scotland – in areas in which the devolved administration has no responsibility. Angus Robertson, the party's constitution and external affairs secretary who launched the report, hardly seemed fazed by those facts: he spoke fluently and familiarly about 'defence, peace and security' and Scotland’s role as 'a good global citizen', even if his party's plan is unlikely to ever see the light of day.

Oh dear. It never takes long for the perpetually-warring SNP to take a pop at someone — but now the party’s leaders are, er, squabbling among themselves. The cause this time? Whether or not the nationalists should boycott Westminster, following Gazagate last month. At least we’d be spared Ian Blackford’s bloviating... Keith Brown, the party’s deputy leader, yesterday took to the pages of that august journal, the Sunday National, to attack Labour for being ‘unrepentant about the illegitimate thwarting of the SNP’s Opposition Day debate’.

As Douglas Ross and his colleagues gather for the annual Scottish Tory conference in Aberdeen this weekend, there are good reasons for the Scottish Conservatives to feel more upbeat than their counterparts elsewhere. In 1997, Scotland proved particularly emblematic of New Labour’s landmark victory. Where the Conservative Party had held 11 seats, they now held none. Their share of the popular vote fell to just over 17 per cent. Three serving cabinet ministers – Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind, Scottish Secretary Michael Forsyth and President of the Board of Trade Ian Lang – were among the more high-profile casualties. As defeats go, it was comprehensive, and reflected a UK-wide disaffection after nearly two decades of Conservative government.

Why is the only party of the centre-right in Scotland so far away from government? As the Labour Party becomes more sensible under Sir Keir Starmer and Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Conservatives are facing an increasingly existential threat. Their conference gets underway in Aberdeen this weekend — and the party must not waste this opportunity to confront what is going wrong. One of the main problems facing Douglas Ross's Scottish Tories is that his party and the SNP are inextricably linked. Both groups are utterly dependent on the prospect of a second independence referendum being credible and real. Think about it: the SNP’s overarching narrative for the last 10 years has been ‘vote for us and you will have a second independence referendum’.

Wednesday’s chaotic procedures in the House of Commons have handed an enormous soapbox to the SNP’s Stephen Flynn. The MP for Aberdeen South, who has led the Scottish National Party’s Westminster group since December 2022, has been intoning gravely that the debate 'descended into farce' and, with suppressed fury, told the speaker that he no longer trusted him to preside impartially over the House. Flynn has tabled an early-day motion which, at time of writing, had 66 signatories, and expresses 'no confidence in Mr Speaker'. Flynn has cause to be upset. His is the third-largest party in the House, with 43 MPs. Moreover, the debate on Gaza was a day on which, rarely, the SNP had chosen the subject under discussion.

The Labour party has run into trouble in Scotland. It is planning to both raise and extend the windfall tax on the oil and gas sector, and industry chiefs aren't happy. It's an issue that is steadily gathering momentum and could prove damaging to the party's chances north of the border. Last week, the Press and Journal depicted Keir Starmer, Anas Sarwar, Ed Miliband and Rachel Reeves as hooded bad guys from the BBC's Traitors series, with one of its writers commenting that 'Labour – the party of workers and unions – is happy to cast tens of thousands of hard-working men and women on the scrapheap, and place a world class Scottish industry on death row.

If the Scottish Labour party are keen to get one message across at their Glasgow conference, it’s that they are the party of change. ‘That is what change means. That is why change matters,’ riffed Anas Sarwar throughout his keynote speech – 14 times, to be precise. But while more specifics about Scottish Labour’s ‘change’ agenda wouldn’t have hurt, the party hardly needs to convince the public that they are committed to it – they’ve changed their position on, er, just about everything.  Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Labour remains in a muddle about its stance on Gaza. While Sarwar used his conference speech to call for an ‘immediate ceasefire’, Ian Murray MP was not quite as clear.

Irony alert up in Scotland. Conference season is upon us again, with Anas Sarwar’s Labour party hosting their three-day soiree in Glasgow. It’s significantly busier — and bigger — than last year’s event, with one veteran declaring to Mr S: ‘This looks like a party preparing to win an election.’ And it was in that spirit that Sarwar gave his keynote speech this afternoon, with the Scottish Labour leader taking aim at the SNP’s recent U-turns. He told the party faithful: ‘It’s hard to keep track of their strategy. First it was “the general election will be a defacto referendum”. Then they scrapped the de facto referendum. Then it was back on the table. Then it was a majority of votes. Then it was about a majority of seats. Then it was the most seats.