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When Nicola Sturgeon’s indyref2 gamble backfired and the SNP got slapped around in the election, it was only a matter of time before the Nats turned on each other. But few expected things to blow up quite so quickly. Anger and anguish, division and recriminations – Scotland’s separatists have spent the past few months afflicting their movement with the rancour they visited on the country for five years. Scottish nationalism is going through a nervous breakdown. Its bloggers are in open warfare. Nicola Sturgeon is under fire from one of her former MPs for throwing her under the bus after a raft of bad headlines. The pro-independence National newspaper has been derided by an MSP as

If a line is repeated often enough it becomes true. Or true enough, anyway. This, at any rate, is one of the axiomatic rules of modern politics. He who controls the ballyhooed “narrative” owns the truth. Which is why the interpretation of any given event swiftly becomes almost as important as the actual event itself. So up-pops Matt Zarb-Cousin, formerly Jeremy Corbyn’s spokesman and now one of his more charming outriders on social media, to claim that it was Jezzah what has saved the Labour party in Scotland. As he puts it, “Corbyn’s supporters have long argued that returning Labour to its socialist roots would be necessary if the party

Step One: Businessman criticises independence. In this case, Les Montgomery, chief executive of the Highland Spring mineral water brand. On Sunday, he told PA: ‘Businesses are fed up. The Scottish Government should be getting on with the job they are there to do. Focusing on employment, investment, those kinds of things. Independence isn’t the job that the Scottish Government is supposed to be doing.’ Step Two: Scottish Government calls businessman. After being told of Montgomery’s remarks, SNP economy minister Keith Brown instructed officials to contact Highland Spring to see if they would like to ‘discuss them further’. Highland Spring confirmed that it was approached by the Scottish Government but wouldn’t

As you approach the Scottish Parliament from the Royal Mile, a modest curve juts out from the obnoxious angles. This camber, the Canongate Wall, is studded with 26 slates of Scottish stone each bearing a quotation from the Bible and scriveners of more questionable repute. Among them is the instruction to ‘work as if you live in the early days of a better nation’, etched on Iona marble and attributed to the novelist Alasdair Gray. The words are totemic for Scottish nationalists, a rallying cry heard often during the 2014 referendum. And why not? They bear the promise of national rebirth, of hope in even the darkest days.  Inside, where

I have an awkward relationship with the House of Lords. On the one hand, it regularly proves a doughty guardian of liberties against a rash, headline-chasing executive. On the other hand, it’s the House of Lords. Hereditary peers, bishops, Liberal Democrats — the clientele are a rum lot. We don’t have our constitutional troubles to seek but we might want to look at getting ourselves one of those elected upper chambers, albeit one independent of Downing Street and party managers.  Nevertheless, the Lords has its uses, and one of the most welcome is bringing experience to government. A good example is Ian Duncan, the Scottish Tory MEP who is reported to

The deposed Scottish Nationalist MP for East Lothian, George Kerevan, found solace this week in the words of a distinguished former editor of The Spectator. Kerevan tweeted: ‘I believe every Scotsman should be a Scottish nationalist’, John Buchan, House of Commons, 24 November, 1932.’ Hundreds of disconsolate Nationalists took to their keyboards to embrace Buchan’s validation of their core belief. A retweet by my own MP, Angus MacNeil, whose devotion to Twitter greatly outweighs his capacity for research, caught my attention. The obvious conclusion was that none of them had actually read what Buchan said in his contribution to the debate on the Queen’s Speech, all those years ago. Anyone

‘Get back to the day job.’ The six magic words that delivered the Scottish Tories their best election night in decades. Ruth Davidson recited this incantation endlessly during the campaign and Labour and the Liberal Democrats quickly joined in. As messages go, it was blunt but effective, capturing the public mood that Nicola Sturgeon has allowed herself to be distracted by the independence issue.  After the UK chose to leave the EU despite Scotland’s Remain vote, the First Minister planned to parlay opposition to Brexit into support for independence. But her scheme went from no-brainer to harebrained in a breathtakingly short period of time. Like Theresa May’s snap election gamble,

Is Nicola Sturgeon, not to put too fine a point on things, losing it? Just six weeks ago this question would have seemed preposterous. But that was before the SNP’s disastrous election result. Yes, disastrous. Sure, everyone expected the SNP to lose votes and seats but no-one really thought they could lose 21; no-one really thought their share of the vote would fall by 13 points or that they would misplace almost half a million voters. No-one thought their result would be so very much worse than expected. No-one includes the opposition points and, pertinently, the SNP itself.  And in response to this, what has Nicola Sturgeon said? Only this:

When Alex Salmond lost the Scottish independence referendum, he sought to console himself and the ranks of the vanquished by declaring ‘the dream shall never die’. It was the salve that soothed the disappointment of a nationalist movement. But today that dream appears to lie in ruins. Two years ago, the SNP swept all before it, claiming 56 of Scotland’s 59 constituencies at Westminster; on last night, they lost almost 40 per cent of those same seats. The reversal cannot be overstated. Salmond, the SNP’s former leader, lost in Gordon. Angus Robertson, their leader in the Commons, lost in Moray. The party was thrown out in East Dunbartonshire after a

‘Strong and stable’, ‘weak and wobbly’, ‘coalition of chaos’: you’ve heard enough of the slogans. Now, election day is nearly upon us. Here’s the Spectator‘s guide to what to watch out for on the night as we find out whether Theresa May is heading for a big win – or an historic blunder: 10pm All eyes will be on the joint exit poll from the BBC, ITV and Sky. In 2015, this was the key moment for the Tories with the poll suggesting that the party was heading for a surprise majority. 11pm Houghton & Sunderland South – where Labour upped its majority in 2015 – is likely to be the

AN: Nicola Sturgeon the SNP has governed Scotland for ten years, so can we start by agreeing that the performance of Scottish public services is the responsibility of you and the SNP government? NS: I take responsibility for the performance of our public services, although Scotland’s overall budget of course is determined by decisions taken at Westminster and our budget has been reduced over the years since the Conservatives have been in office. AN: Let’s start then with Alex Salmond’s former head of policy Alex Bell, this is what he’s had to say. ‘The evidence shows that we, the SNP, haven’t closed the poverty gap, redistributed wealth, improved education of

That the Tories would enjoy this general election campaign and Labour would spend it alternating between abject misery and total panic was a given from the moment Theresa May announced she wanted to go to the polls. More of a surprise has been how uncomfortable the Liberal Democrats have looked so far. Tim Farron has spent far too much time defending and then apparently recanting various unpopular beliefs. The party is averaging nine per cent in the polls. One analysis suggests they could end up with fewer than the nine seats they currently hold. What’s going wrong? Aside from Farron’s awkward media encounters over his religious beliefs, the party may

I am afraid that whenever a politician asks to be judged on their record, it is sensible to assume this reflects a confidence they won’t be. At the very least such promises are hostages to future headlines. Take, for instance, Nicola Sturgeon’s boast that education  – and specifically closing the gap between the best and worst schools in Scotland – is her top priority. Judge me on this, she said. Well, OK.  Today the SNP government published the results of the latest Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy and, as has become annually predictable, they make for depressing reading. While standards of reading have remained relatively constant amongst both primary and

Well, then. It turns out that the revival of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party is a real thing. Last year, the party won 31 seats at the Scottish parliament elections, supplanting Labour as the second force in Scottish politics. This week, it became the second largest party in local government across Scotland. The Tories are a party reborn, the beneficiaries of an increasingly polarised political landscape. It may be ironic that Ruth Davidson’s party benefits from the SNP’s dominance but there you have it. Caveats apply, of course. The voting system used in Scottish council elections helps the Tories. The single transferable vote is a very different beast to

When launching the Scottish National Party’s election campaign, Nicola Sturgeon said the word ‘Tory’ 20 times in 20 minutes. For much of her political lifetime, it has been used by the SNP as the dirtiest word in Scottish politics. Nationalists have long liked to portray the Conservatives as the successors to Edward Longshanks: an occupying army with little affinity for the people they were trying to govern. But things are changing fast in Scotland. Amid the other political dramas of the past few months, the revival of Tory support north of the border has gone relatively unnoticed. They had only one MP after the last election, but a poll this

Well, golly, Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the SNP and First Minister of Scotland, says this general election has nothing to do with the arguments for or against Scottish independence.  In one sense, this is correct in as much as independence is not the question on the ballot. But in another, deeper, more genuine sense, everyone knows Sturgeon is pulling your leg here. The election is a proxy referendum on the question of whether there should, at some point in the next couple of years, be another independence referendum. Everyone in Scotland, including SNP supporters, knows this. Even so, as the Tories have noted, this is a familiar SNP argument. In

At the time of their 1997 wipeout, the Scottish Tories were at least hated. When I was reporting from the Scottish Parliament some 14 years later, things were even worse: there was curiosity, even pity, for Tory supporters. One Tory MSP told me the party should rename itself “the effing Tories” because that’s what they had become known as. Voting Conservative was no longer seen as a giant evil, more a harmless perversion – like cross-dressing (or cricket). Then Ruth Davidson came along, then Jeremy Corbyn, then the SNP with its obsession with referenda – and now, everything has changed. The above graph shows the latest voting intention in Scotland, with the Tories soaring

Although a government statement on the labour market statistics for Scotland doesn’t on the surface sound like the juiciest news release of the day, today’s has proved rather revealing. With unemployment in Scotland down by 15,000 in the period December 2016 to February 2017, the Scottish unemployment rate has fallen to 4.5 per cent — below the rate of 4.7 per cent for the whole of the UK. You might expect the Scotland Office press release to trumpet this good news but instead it turns its guns on the SNP — pointing to the fact that the Scots employment rate decreased by 0.1 percentage points over the quarter to 73.4 per cent. The