Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

I shed a tear for the SNP

issue 22 April 2023

For people who take politics seriously and very earnestly, such as myself, the present debacle within the Scottish National party is surely a time of great sadness and disappointment, rather than of jumping up in the air, screaming ‘Ha ha ha, suck it up, you malevolent ginger dwarf!’ and breaking open the champers.

Gloating in such a manner is odious and juvenile and so I simply shook my head sadly and even shed a tear when I heard that the party’s treasurer, Colin Beattie, had been arrested. In fact I spent most of the day beneath a shroud of tears, having learned that the mega campervan parked outside Peter Murrell’s mum’s house had been bought for ‘campaigning purposes’ during the pandemic – and then read the transcript of Nicola Sturgeon’s Putinish lecture to members of the SNP’s National Executive Committee who had dared to question the state of the party’s finances.

It seems perfectly clear from south of the border that the SNP leadership contest should be rerun

The tears failed to cease when the party’s inept new leader, Humza Yousaf, insisted that there was no reason for Sturgeon to resign her seat, because we have ‘moved past the time’ when wives can be held responsible for the actions of their spouses. Yousaf, I think, is an idiot – but then so too are the Scottish police if they continue to display a complete lack of curiosity about what little Ma Sturgeon knew and when. Are we really to believe she had not the slightest idea anything whatsoever untoward was taking place? That she did not know about the existence of the campervan, or how it had been bought, or why it spent so long at her mum-in-law’s house?

Perhaps she didn’t – but one way or another, don’t the rozzers think it might be interesting to find out, by talking to her for a bit? Apparently not.

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