Things aren’t exactly going well for Nicola Sturgeon at the moment, with bin strikes underway across Scotland leaving half the country festering under piles of rubbish.
Which perhaps explains why the First Minister was so keen to skip the country yesterday, leaving the difficult business of government behind her to open a glitzy new Scottish ‘Nordic office’ in Copenhagen. The office is the ninth Scottish ‘international hub’, and is expected to cost £600,000 a year. Exactly why Scotland needs a Nordic office is rather less clear to Steerpike – but one rather suspects that endless amounts of taxpayer money can be bunged away in Scotland as long as it helps Nicola Sturgeon pretend to be a statesman on the world stage.
To that end, Sturgeon was aided admirably by the National newspaper this weekend, which is currently in full SNP-Pravda mode. Its Saturday font page splashes on the ‘exclusive’ news that:
‘WORLD MEDIA RESPECT FM – UNLIKE THE UK’S’
Mr S was intrigued to find out though which doyennes of the world media are lining up to pay homage to the First Minister – heads of networks in America? Newspaper editors from the world’s capitals?
Errr, perhaps not. In fact it appears that the entire story is based on the opinion of a single Bosnian news anchor for the channel N1 – an affiliate of CNN based in Ljubljana, Belgrade, Sarajevo and Zagreb.
Ika Ferrer Gotic, who describes Scotland as her second home, told the paper that ‘the international media looks at Nicola Sturgeon, not as somebody who is dividing Scotland, [but] as a woman leader in Europe’ and ‘all of the journalists’ around the world hold the same view. Well, that’s Mr S convinced.
All of this quite embarrassing, even by the National’s low standards. Perhaps the nationalist cause is struggling more than Steerpike thought. When the propaganda is bad enough to make Pravda blush, the wheels must really be coming off…
Comments