QUOTE of the week came from an election briefing held by the Scottish Greens, when rookie campaign manager Laura Eaton-Lewis bragged about all the new staff beavering away at party HQ.
"Yes, but exactly how many staff?" asked an exasperated hack.
Ms Eaton-Lewis hesitated before clarifying there was an extra "0.6 finance officer", ie. someone doing three days a week. Her background, as if you couldn’t guess, is in PR.
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LIZ Lochhead’s exit as National Makar has coincided with the release of new stats on Holyrood’s VIP chauffeur service, much used by her chum Presiding Officer Tricia Marwick.
It shows taxpayers were billed £822 to chauffeur Ms Lochhead over three days between Glasgow and the parliament’s opening ceremony in 2011 and a cultural summit in 2013.
Curiously, no other guests enjoyed the perk. Politics is delivered in poetry but bills are delivered in prose.
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The same figures also show Ms Marwick was routinely chauffeured between her home in Fife and Edinburgh for the annual remembrance day service as part of her parliamentary duties.
Between 2011 and 2014, the bill came to just over £1300. Presumably taking the train would have been too great a sacrifice.
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AS those happy clappy talks on the indecipherable fiscal framework continue it emerges that there's trouble at the Treasury. Greg Hands aka Springy - something to do with his hair apparently - has lost part of a tooth.
Uninformed and very junior sources suggest it has nothing to do with the performance of Springy's friend Fluffy - the Secretary of State for Scotland David Mundell to you and me - but might be as a result of those endless hours jabbering to John Swinney about indexed deduction and the Barnett Formula.
So as the Treasury gnashes its teeth, the Scottish Government continues to wail. Very biblical. Valentine's Day looks a long way off.
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IMAGINE grizzled Nationalist hero Pete Wishart tinkling the ivories in a golden lame suit? Hard to do perhaps but the image was conjured up during Business Questions in the Commons when the Perth MP and keyboards man for the parliamentary band MP4 told Commons Leader Chris Grayling (better known as Dr Evel) that the time had come for the nation to get behind "MP4 for Eurovision!"
As MPs looked on rather bemused, Mr W said: "We have had all these young starlet acts trying to achieve a win but now is the time for grizzled old politicians to get in there and do their bit for the United Kingdom. I am sure I will secure the support of the whole House for MP4 for Eurovision."
He certainly got Dr Evel's vote but this perhaps could be the one and only time the SNP rottweiler/pussycat was heard declaring proudly that he wanted to do his "bit for the UK". A collector's item.
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TREASURY chief, Greg "Springy" Hands, noted how some had likened the fiscal framework talks to the Schleswig-Holstein Question, which, as loyal readers will recall, was the 19th century diplomatic conundrum only understood by three people - one was dead, one had gone mad and the third had forgotten what it was all about. Doesn't bode well for a positive outcome.
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