To Scotland, where the SNP’s newest health secretary has found himself in a rather large, Oasis-sized mess. At the weekend, Neil Gray was called out by the Sunday Mail for taking his eye off his day job and attempting to buy tickets to see the newly-reformed band during a conference event on Alzheimer’s disease. Mr S is rather unsurprised to learn Gray knows a thing or two about the Importance of Being Idle…
The initial story reported how, after Glasgow University’s Terry Quinn had finished a heartfelt speech on dementia, Scotland’s health secretary looked up from his phone to confess: ‘I’m in the queue to buy Oasis tickets on multiple devices. Hope is very important… that I get these tickets.’ Gray further admitted that he was ‘half a world away’ from securing gig access during the Alzheimer’s event. Talk about flippant, eh?
Yet rather curiously the health secretary took umbrage with the story after its publication. Gray was quick to jump on social media to fume that the front page splash was ‘total nonsense‘, insisting:
In intros to a fringe session I was chairing another panellist jokingly referred to Oasis tickets. I said, like so many, I was in the queue, but felt ‘half the world away’ from getting any. People laughed and we went into the serious business. I wasn’t trying to buy tickets in the meeting.
The newspaper hit back, with journalists claiming Gray’s very own press team had backed up the piece. And today, the story has taken another odd twist…
Now the health secretary has told LBC that he was in fact in an online queue for tickets during the panel session, admitting:
Like most people on Saturday, I think everybody was in a queue… I was in the queue and anybody that understands how being a queue for tickets works, it wasn’t something that was fast moving. So my phone was in my pocket, there was progress made in this queue dispersing.
Er, right. But Gray’s new story still doesn’t quite match what the Sunday Mail printed – and now journalist John Ferguson has taken to Twitter to blast the health secretary for attempting to ‘mislead’ the public, tweeting: ‘He says: “My phone was in my pocket.” That is not the case. His phone was in his hand and he was looking at it as he told the meeting he was in the queue for Oasis tickets.’ Good heavens. Some Might Say this is turning into quite the mess…
But this isn’t, of course, the first time an SNP health secretary has come under scrutiny over honesty concerns. Michael Matheson’s iPad scandal comes to mind…
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