If James Dornan did not exist, Mr Steerpike would surely invent him, for the SNP MSP for Glasgow Cathcart is so fantastically absurd that he supplies endless (and endlessly entertaining) copy. Dornan is in the news again, this time for pronouncing that the BBC’s Sarah Smith imagined the abuse and misogyny she experienced while covering Scottish politics.
During her tenure as the Beeb’s Scotland Editor, Smith was turned into a hate figure by cybernats, the digital foot soldiers of Scottish nationalism who target opposition politicians, journalists and anyone else out of step with Nicola Sturgeon’s inclusive, progressive Scotland. Smith, who is heading to the US to become the BBC North America Editor, told an interviewer it would be a ‘relief’ to leave behind the Scotland beat and ‘the criticism, bile and hatred’ that came with it.
Smith revealed that people would ‘roll their car windows down to ask me, “What f***ing lies you’re going to be telling on TV tonight, you f***ing lying bitch?”’ She also complained of ‘the misogynistic idea that I can’t have any of my own thoughts’ because her father was the late Labour leader John Smith.
That she expects to face less vilification while covering US current affairs speaks either to naiveté on her part or to the scarring political and personal hatreds unleashed in Scotland by the toxic independence issue. Quitting Scotland for America to escape flag-waving nativists is the stuff of frying pans and fires.
Many will have raised an eyebrow at the hounding of Smith, and its reminders of the targeting of other journalists in Scotland. Not so James Dornan, who tweeted on Thursday morning: ‘America would be the go to place to escape all her imaginary woes then.’ That tweet now appears to have been deleted after being picked up by some of the Scottish papers.
Mr Steerpike can’t help but be impressed by Dornan’s gymnastic flexibility when it comes to hatred in politics. After all, this is the man who told Catholic MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, ’If your god exists you will undoubtedly rot in hell,’ and the same man who had to apologise after suggesting Lothian Buses, long a target of anti-social behaviour, had cancelled its night-time service on St Patrick’s Day 2021 because it concluded ‘that Irish Catholics were to blame for the rise in antisocial behaviour’.
Imaginary woes, indeed.
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