Scotland

Another day, another financial catastrophe for the SNP. This time it concerns the recent Rutherglen by-election, which saw the nationalists lose the Westminster seat to Labour in a humiliating defeat. But the by-election wasn’t the only embarrassing loss facing the Nats: their party bank balance took a hit too. It transpires that the SNP spent many thousands of pounds more on their campaign than their competitors. Talk about adding insult to injury… First Minister Humza Yousaf’s party spent £96,000 on their failed by-election campaign, which amounted to a staggering £14,000 more than Scottish Labour. ‘What were they spending their money on?’ laughed one Labour canvasser. ‘They were nowhere to be

Well, well, well. It may have been seven years since David Cameron was last involved in frontline politics, but he’s certainly not forgotten the skill of a political interview. Quizzed this evening by BBC political editor Chris Mason, Cameron managed to, er, dodge just about every question he was asked when it came to the Greensill scandal. Two years ago, Cameron made approximately £8.2 million promoting finance business Greensill Capital, which later collapsed as criminal inquiries into its alleged fraud began. Prior to the company’s collapse, Cameron had intensively lobbied civil servants in 2020 to allow Greensill to lend up to £10 billion in emergency Covid loans. But when quizzed

Today, on Remembrance Day, wreaths will be laid to remember the fallen at 11am at the Stone of Remembrance. It follows the firing of Edinburgh Castle’s One O’clock Gun at 11am yesterday on Armistice Day. In London, there was a firing of guns from Horse Guards Parade and a procession past the Cenotaph. Last Remembrance Day, Nicola Sturgeon lead a wreath outside Edinburgh City Chambers. Humza Yousaf will likely do the same this morning. The history of Scotland and England is one of shared war. It’s only relatively recently, then, that Scots have fought alongside the English, playing a major role in the British army. The union came through war and conquest.

This week, the Welsh parliament announced that it ‘condemns the Israeli Government’s indiscriminate attacks on Gaza’ and ‘calls on the international community to…bring pressure to bear on the Israeli Government to end the siege of Gaza which contravenes international law and the basic human rights of Palestinian civilians’. Those were the terms of a motion laid by Plaid Cymru and passed by Members of the Senedd by 24 to 19, with 13 abstentions. The motion was not entirely without merit: it condemned Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians and called for the hostages to be released. But this story nonetheless offers a signal from the devolution crisis that no one in

The SNP’s finances are back at the top of the news agenda. Michael Matheson, Holyrood’s hopeless health secretary has somehow managed to rack up an £11,000 bill on his parliamentary iPad. It appears that when the government minister was holidaying in Morocco with his family, he forgot to switch on his WiFi. But instead of admitting to the foolishness of his blunder and paying up, Matheson has begrudgingly made a ‘donation’ of £3,000 from his publicly funded office allowances. ‘Shameless’ doesn’t quite cut it… Holyrood insiders told the Telegraph that the former net zero secretary refused to pay the remaining £7,935.74 from his own purse, deferring it instead to the Scottish parliament.

The Holyrood WhatsApp drama can now be upgraded from ‘mystery’ to ‘scandal’. As if not handing over important messages wasn’t bad enough, the First Minister and his deputy have today been accused of misleading the Scottish parliament on the UK Covid Inquiry. It seems pantomime season starts early north of the border… Yousaf and deputy first minister Shona Robison told the Chamber last week that the Scottish government had only been asked for Covid WhatsApp messages in September. It now turns out this isn’t quite the case. After the Covid Inquiry requested the Scottish government set out the timeline of events in full, it became clear that it had first

The Scottish government has launched another white paper on independence, this time on the subject of migration. It is the sixth paper in the ‘Building a New Scotland’ series setting out the SNP-Green administration’s vision for a post-UK Scotland. The substance of the document isn’t as important as the fact of its existence. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Scottish parliament cannot legislate for an independence referendum. The UK parliament shows no inclination to permit another referendum. So why is the Scottish government using public resources to promote a prospectus for a constitutional event that is opposed by Westminster and may never happen? This is yet another reason why

You have to hand it to the Scottish government: the deletion of WhatsApp messages is good preemptive news management, whether accidental, by default or deliberate. Once journalists get their hands on them, those curt, day-to-day messages can be just a tad embarrassing — as this week’s expletive-laden evidence to the UK Covid Inquiry confirms. The Scottish government may not, however, be subjected to the same level of message scrutiny. Just how many WhatsApps have been deleted we still do not know. The Scottish government policy on message deletion was confirmed yesterday in a convoluted statement from the deputy first minister Shona Robison, which came just after Dominic Cummings had finished giving

The mystery of the missing WhatsApps continues. Deputy First Minister Shona Robison took to the floor at Holyrood today to issue an update about the Scottish Government’s interactions with the UK Covid Inquiry. Amid ongoing concern about whether ministers deleted public records, Robison’s contributions don’t offer a whole lot of clarity… Addressing the Scottish parliament today, Robison said that all requested Scottish Government messages that are still ‘held’ will be shared ‘in full and unredacted’ by 6 November. Any deleted messages ‘will be for individuals to explain to the inquiries any actions they have taken in relation to records retention,’ she continued ominously. But ‘with regards to the Scottish Government’s records management

The mystery of the missing WhatsApps gets murkier. The Scottish Sunday Mail revealed yesterday that Nicola Sturgeon ‘manually’ deleted WhatsApp messages from during the pandemic; her successor Humza Yousaf was one of the government figures who was reported as claiming that the relevant message data no longer exists. The First Minister denies this, however. ‘I’ve kept WhatsApp messages and fully intend to hand them over,’ Yousaf clarified today. The media debate now centres around whether the Scottish Government had a policy on social media messaging in place — and when exactly the messages of senior figures were deleted. Yousaf has today shed light on the first of these questions. In

A great modern Scottish myth is that the handling of the coronavirus pandemic by government ministers in Edinburgh was vastly superior to that of their counterparts in London. This rather distasteful display of Scottish exceptionalism ignores the fact that where the UK government got things right, so did the Scottish and that, likewise, mistakes were replicated on both sides of the border. This should come as a surprise to nobody. Quite rightly, both the UK and Scottish governments moved in lockstep throughout the worst of the pandemic, with scientific advisers and ministers in regular cross-border contact. It’s not as if Sturgeon didn’t know that an inquiry would, in time, wish