Ping! An email in Steerpike’s inbox lands, subject line: ‘SNP’s attack on refs.’ Is this, at last, a moment of nationalist self-reflection? Have the 45 per cent-ers finally clocked most Scots don’t want another plebiscite? Could some SNP drone finally have switched off the autopilot to question the wisdom of a neverendum? Sadly for Scotland, the answer to all these questions is: no. For it seems that James Dornan, the hard-of-thinking MSP who frequently features in Steerpike’s pages, is once again up to his usual tricks.
Dornan of course is the ‘racist buses’ conspiracy theorist who claimed in June that an Edinburgh transport company had stopped services on St Patrick’s Day because of ‘anti-Irish racism’ (one of many sensationalist claims for which he has no evidence.) Now he’s moved on from buses to training his guns on referees instead. During Celtic’s 2-1 win against Ross County on Wednesday, the fanatical Hoops fan was so incensed with a minor officiating decision that he took to Twitter to complain that ‘Scottish referees are utterly useless, and if they’re not useless then they can only be something much more sinister.’
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