Stephen Daisley

Presented for whatever is the opposite of your edification, an exchange between the leaders of Scotland’s main political parties. The setting is Tuesday night’s Holyrood election hustings, hosted via Zoom by the National Union of Students. We begin with Nicola Sturgeon accusing Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross of being inconsistent on who gets credit for the Covid vaccination programme in Scotland. Nicola Sturgeon: Make your mind up. Douglas Ross: No, I was saying your rollout was poor. Your rollout was poor. NS: But the point is, the UK chose to— DR: But answer the question— It’s like watching a very dressed-down remake of Mean Girls. Totally not fetch.

There isn’t much I agree with in the SNP’s manifesto for the Holyrood elections, so it seems peevish to cavil about the policies to which I am generally sympathetic. These are: a national care service, 100,000 new houses, abolition of dental charges, free school meals, investment in closing the attainment gap and more money for skills and training. I might quibble with the universalism of some measures because I would rather see resources redistributed from those with means to those without them. Even so, the Nationalists are making some of the right noises, if purely for their own electoral benefit rather than any late conversion to social democracy. The obvious question, then: How do they intend to pay for it?

This week's Holyrood election debate should not be allowed to pass without noting how it highlighted the dismal state of Unionism. Nicola Sturgeon revisited a point she has been underscoring heavily during this campaign: that a majority of nationalist MSPs returned after May 6 would represent a mandate for another referendum on Scotland seceding from the United Kingdom. Scottish nationalists have a curious relationship with popular sovereignty, seeing no contradiction in espousing this doctrine while harking back to the Declaration of Arbroath, a pledge of aristocratic fealty and an apologia for the divine right of kings. Among Sturgeon’s statements during the STV debate was: ‘The future of the country should be for the people in Scotland to decide. That is democracy.

There is a whiff of something in the current Scottish Parliament elections. It’s not quite strong enough to call it foul but nor is it faint enough to go undetected. What I can tell you is this: it doesn’t smell right. Yesterday, Alex Salmond’s new party, Alba, released a video depicting throngs of flag-waving nationalists with a voiceover delivered by an actor from the imagined perspective of Robert the Bruce. (If that seems like an odd idea for an election ad, welcome to Scotland.) ‘Bruce’ described the Battle of Bannockburn thus: ‘People power by the small folk of Scotland was the straw which broke the spine of English superiority’.

The death of the Duke of Edinburgh has paused campaigning in the Scottish Parliament election, which provides an opportunity to reflect on just how bizarre the election is proving to be. Naturally, the SNP is far ahead in the polls, on 53 per cent of the constituency vote in this week’s Ipsos-MORI research. SNP dominance is now as hard-wired into Scottish politics as Labour dominance once was and the new religion is just as unmoved as the old one by heresies about policy failings or poor governance. What is uncanny is that nationalists and Unionists have simultaneously gone into revolt against their own side weeks out from polling day.

There was a Scooby Doo moment in Alex Salmond’s campaign launch on Tuesday. Something that made me think: ‘Ruh-roh’. The new leader of the Alba party was setting out his stall ahead of the 6 May Holyrood election and concentrating mostly on tactics. Voting for the SNP in the constituencies and Alba on the proportional list ballot, he contended, could elect a Scottish parliament with a ‘supermajority’ for independence. Thereafter — in fact, in week one of that new parliament — he would expect the Scottish government to open negotiations with Whitehall for the dismantling of the United Kingdom.

When he was acquitted on sexual assault charges at the High Court in Edinburgh last March, I predicted: ‘Alex Salmond is back from the dead and he will have his revenge’. The past 12 months has seen a relentless onslaught against Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP establishment and anyone who thought that would culminate in the equivocal findings of two inquiries (one clearing Sturgeon, the other damning her) will have been disabused this afternoon. Salmond has announced his return to politics in time for May’s Holyrood elections, under the banner of an outfit calling itself the Alba Party. The party will stand only on the regional list and is pitching itself as an effort to help secure an ‘independence supermajority’.

James Hamilton’s inquiry has found that Nicola Sturgeon did not breach the ministerial code. The former Irish prosecutor, who serves as the independent adviser on the code, was tasked with reviewing the Holyrood First Minister’s actions in relation to the Alex Salmond affair. Hamilton considered four allegations: That Sturgeon’s failure to record meetings and phone conversations with Alex Salmond and others (held between March 29 and July 18, 2018) breached the code’s provisions that ‘meetings on official business should normally be arranged through Private Offices’ and ‘a private secretary or official should be present for all discussions relating to government business’.

Among the many challenges facing Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross has been the question of definition. It is difficult to define yourself in the best of times, let alone in the middle of a pandemic. When, on top of this, your seat is in Westminster, and not the devolved parliament on which the Scottish media focuses their resources and priorities, it’s harder still to penetrate the public consciousness. No matter how often you try to get yourself in front of a TV camera, you can still feel like the Invisible Man. Ross used his speech to the Scottish Conservative conference to narrate who he is and what he believes.