Scotland

More trouble for Humza Yousaf’s beleaguered Health Secretary Michael Matheson. A new poll for STV News shows 61 per cent of Scots think he should resign over the £11,000 bill in data charges racked up on his parliamentary iPad during a family holiday to Morocco.  The bill was covered by the taxpayer out of a combination of Matheson’s office expenses and the Scottish parliament’s coffers. He originally professed ignorance as to how the charges were incurred but says his teenage sons later admitted to using the taxpayer-funded data to watch football matches. The minister subsequently agreed to reimburse the parliament in full.

As the general election approaches, Scottish Labour are taking their battle positions. Douglas Alexander, former cabinet minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, has been selected as the candidate for East Lothian. Kirsty McNeill, former special adviser to Brown while he was in No. 10, has been selected as the next candidate for Midlothian. But undoubtedly the pick of the battles is in East Renfrewshire where party members have selected Blair McDougall, head of the ‘Better Together’ campaign in 2014, to stand against Kirsten Oswald, the current SNP chair. Talk about a referendum rerun… The first is likely to be Scotland’s most intense skirmish in next year’s contest.

It’s another week of rancour and recrimination in the SNP’s unhappy family. Today it’s the turn of rebel backbencher Fergus Ewing. Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland this morning, the born-and-bred nationalist hit out at his own party’s ’somewhat cack-handed’ handling of their proposed council tax freeze, bemoaning how there ‘was no proper consultation with our colleagues in local government.’ Talk about cracks in the once-impregnable SNP front…  It comes three weeks before the Scottish government is due to unveil its winter budget. With money tight and the polls plummeting, Humza Yousaf’s bungling band of bureaucrats has stumbled on the answer: blame the Tories.

The former First Minister, Alex Salmond, is to sue Nicola Sturgeon and her former civil servants for ‘misfeasance’. In court documents today he accuses her and her officials of having ‘conducted themselves improperly, in bad faith and beyond their powers with the intention of injuring Mr Salmond’. The surprise is that it has taken him so long.   It is nearly four years since Salmond won his judicial review against the Scottish government over its mishandling of claims of sexual misconduct. Judges in the Court of Session, Scotland’s highest civil court, ruled in January 2019 that the Scottish government’s investigation into the allegations, overseen by the then-permanent secretary, Leslie Evans, had been ‘unlawful’ and ‘tainted with apparent bias’.

Uh oh. It’s not looking good for Scotland’s health secretary Michael Matheson. During a rather tearful speech in the Chamber last week, Matheson revealed that he had referred himself to the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body for an external review. While this temporarily halted press enquiries into the details, the referral isn’t the safety net Matheson desperately needs. For now it turns out that the SPCB wants to investigate him further. So far it’s only taken Holyrood 10 months to act… However, the watchdog won’t be looking into the porkies Matheson told the press last week — namely, denying his iPad had been used for personal activities when he knew it had.

Matters of war and peace are not devolved, but they have nevertheless become the most powerful weapon in the SNP’s armoury as it seeks to fight back against a resurgent Scottish Labour party. Of course, given the nationalists’ record of misjudgement and appeasement in foreign policy, it is perhaps little surprise to see its motion to the Scottish parliament on Tuesday supporting an immediate, condition-free ceasefire. By supporting an immediate ceasefire, the SNP has put Scottish Labour – bullish after its victory in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election – and particularly its leader, in a difficult spot. There is no doubt the motion is also good domestic politics for the nationalists, even if the SNP’s present folly follows a long line of former follies.

If you can’t fix a problem, pretend it never existed. That seems to be the logic of SNP MP Alyn Smith at least. Speaking at ‘The Breakup of Britain’ conference this weekend, the Stirling MP appeared to suggest to his audience that Scotland’s ferries scandal is, er, not actually a priority for the people of Scotland. Smith told the distinctly silver crowd that: I knocked the best part of 200 doors this morning. Actually talking to people out there in the real world who want some hope, who want to know that politics isn’t all about WhatsApp messages, iPads and ferries. It’s about bigger stuff than that. It’s about dealing with the priorities of the people of Scotland. Talk about being out of touch.

When it comes to pomposity, nobody in Scottish politics can compete with SNP president Mike Russell. A great comic archetype in the tradition of Captain Mainwairing or Hyacinth Bucket, Russell combines a thwocking great dollop of self regard with a devastating lack of self-awareness. As such, it was hardly surprising to see Russell clamber up on his high horse when it came to the matter of an expenses claim for £11,000 of mobile data lodged by Scottish Health Secretary, Michael Matheson. Isn’t the real damage caused by dishonest politicians?

Another day, another tech-related scandal for the SNP. Health secretary Michael Matheson has come under fire for running up a whopping £11,000 bill on his iPad in roaming charges — and initially being prepared to let the taxpayer pick up the bill. Today he gave a lengthy speech explaining himself to the Scottish parliament. He repeatedly choked back tears as he fought to save his career... He told MSPs that ‘the simple truth’ is that his teenage sons had used his parliamentary device to stream football matches — a fact Matheson claims he was only made aware of by his wife last Thursday evening.

Another day, another financial catastrophe for the SNP. This time it concerns the recent Rutherglen by-election, which saw the nationalists lose the Westminster seat to Labour in a humiliating defeat. But the by-election wasn’t the only embarrassing loss facing the Nats: their party bank balance took a hit too. It transpires that the SNP spent many thousands of pounds more on their campaign than their competitors. Talk about adding insult to injury… First Minister Humza Yousaf’s party spent £96,000 on their failed by-election campaign, which amounted to a staggering £14,000 more than Scottish Labour. 'What were they spending their money on?' laughed one Labour canvasser. 'They were nowhere to be seen!

Well, well, well. It may have been seven years since David Cameron was last involved in frontline politics, but he’s certainly not forgotten the skill of a political interview. Quizzed this evening by BBC political editor Chris Mason, Cameron managed to, er, dodge just about every question he was asked when it came to the Greensill scandal. Two years ago, Cameron made approximately £8.2 million promoting finance business Greensill Capital, which later collapsed as criminal inquiries into its alleged fraud began. Prior to the company’s collapse, Cameron had intensively lobbied civil servants in 2020 to allow Greensill to lend up to £10 billion in emergency Covid loans.

Today, on Remembrance Day, wreaths will be laid to remember the fallen at 11am at the Stone of Remembrance. It follows the firing of Edinburgh Castle’s One O’clock Gun at 11am yesterday on Armistice Day. In London, there was a firing of guns from Horse Guards Parade and a procession past the Cenotaph. Last Remembrance Day, Nicola Sturgeon lead a wreath outside Edinburgh City Chambers. Humza Yousaf will likely do the same this morning. The history of Scotland and England is one of shared war. It’s only relatively recently, then, that Scots have fought alongside the English, playing a major role in the British army. The union came through war and conquest. By 78 AD, all of England and Wales was under Roman control, but some of Scotland was never taken over.

This week, the Welsh parliament announced that it ‘condemns the Israeli Government’s indiscriminate attacks on Gaza’ and ‘calls on the international community to...bring pressure to bear on the Israeli Government to end the siege of Gaza which contravenes international law and the basic human rights of Palestinian civilians’. Those were the terms of a motion laid by Plaid Cymru and passed by Members of the Senedd by 24 to 19, with 13 abstentions. The motion was not entirely without merit: it condemned Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians and called for the hostages to be released. But this story nonetheless offers a signal from the devolution crisis that no one in Downing Street or Whitehall wants to acknowledge.

The SNP’s finances are back at the top of the news agenda. Michael Matheson, Holyrood’s hopeless health secretary has somehow managed to rack up an £11,000 bill on his parliamentary iPad. It appears that when the government minister was holidaying in Morocco with his family, he forgot to switch on his WiFi. But instead of admitting to the foolishness of his blunder and paying up, Matheson has begrudgingly made a ‘donation’ of £3,000 from his publicly funded office allowances. ‘Shameless' doesn’t quite cut it… Holyrood insiders told the Telegraph that the former net zero secretary refused to pay the remaining £7,935.74 from his own purse, deferring it instead to the Scottish parliament.

The Holyrood WhatsApp drama can now be upgraded from ‘mystery’ to ‘scandal’. As if not handing over important messages wasn’t bad enough, the First Minister and his deputy have today been accused of misleading the Scottish parliament on the UK Covid Inquiry. It seems pantomime season starts early north of the border… Yousaf and deputy first minister Shona Robison told the Chamber last week that the Scottish government had only been asked for Covid WhatsApp messages in September. It now turns out this isn’t quite the case. After the Covid Inquiry requested the Scottish government set out the timeline of events in full, it became clear that it had first requested messages in February — seven months earlier than Yousaf had initially claimed.