Alex Wickham

The SNP run riot at Westminster

  • From Spectator Life
(Photo by Geoff Pugh/REX)

Standing on chairs in Parliament’s Sports and Social bar, a band of portly gentlemen are bellowing out Scottish folk songs. A young barmaid, only in her early twenties yet a seasoned veteran when it comes to turfing out unruly Westminster soaks, approaches a new SNP MP and politely asks him to pack it in. Words are exchanged. Multiple witnesses allege a drunken ‘f— you’ is uttered. Defeated, the barmaid retreats behind the bar to mocking male laughter. So upset is she by the incident, she will leave her job a few weeks later. ‘They’re only just getting started,’ sighs a Labour wag as he reaches for his coat. The conquering horde of Scots Nats have come to town and they are making themselves heard.

SW1 certainly expected the worst from the new SNP cohort. As the Glasgow East MP Natalie McGarry puts it, ‘They thought we would come down waving flags, with our faces painted blue and white.’ Yet those preconceptions were not without substance. An extraordinary, never-before-seen document written by disgruntled SNP aides — and passed to me while researching this article — reveals that even the party’s own employees have been horrified by their MPs’ behaviour for a while. In their own staff’s words, the Westminster group are described as ‘complete arseholes’ and Alex Salmond is nicknamed ‘Mr Terror’, while Angus MacNeil is accused of being ‘arrogant, demanding and in general behaving like a five-year-old… [He] has some problems understanding why he is here, although the Sports and Social bar is extremely happy that he is.’

To find out whether the new intake are living up to their reputation, Westminster’s watering holes are the only place to begin. The Sports and Social is traditionally a Labour haunt, earning it the nickname ‘Sports and Socialist’. Just two weeks after polling day, to quote one Blairite boozehound, it had been ‘colonised’ by the Scots.

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