LABOUR leader Kezia Dugdale gave her party’s local election launch a swerve on Tuesday, leaving it to deputy Alex Rowley. Relations between the two have never been good, as the Corbynite Mr Rowley has a knack for going off script. So was Team Kez sending a message with his intro music? As he strode to the lectern, out blared David Bowie’s Rebel Rebel.

WHEN David Cameron introduced ‘English Votes for English Law', English MPs were told it would let their voices be heard. Thing is, that does require speaking. As Nat Pete Wishart noted last week, when EVEL was invoked and English MPs given the floor, “not one word was said”. David Lidington, Tory leader of the House, was unfazed. Total silence showed the policy was “operating in an uncontroversial and consensual manner”, he reckoned. Hmm.

AFTER all that festive booze, many citizens wisely opt for a dry January. Our MSPs, however, have established a new body devoted to liquid refreshment. The founding meeting of the Cross Party Group (CPG) on Beer and Pubs took place on Thursday, with the Campaign for Real Ale helping with the organisation. Perhaps appropriately, it is listed on the Holyrood website next to the CPG on “End of Life Choices”.

ANOTHER year, another gratuitous nickname for Scottish Labour spindoctor Alan Roden, we hear, after he literally rolled his sleeves up on behalf of the party. For while his male colleagues are conspicuously hirsute, Red Roddo’s pale and slender limbs turned out to be as smooth as a porcelain doll. He has now been dubbed “lady arms” by his workmates, or LA for short. So if you’re wondering why Labour HQ is known as LA LA Land, now you know.

TALKING of spindoctors, we hear SNP Westminster press gopher Tom French is taking a risk with his mail. He rented an Edinburgh flat from a hack before moving to London, but failed to redirect his post. His ex-landlord now has piles of letters from the SNP, and who knows what secrets lurk within. And we thought it was his job to keep stories out of the hands of the press.

MORE news on the hustings-phobic SNP MSP for Coatbridge, Fulton ‘No Show’ MacGregor. He may keep a low profile back home, but at Holyrood his confidence is growing. So much so that he decided to quote himself at length in an education debate last week. Digging out some old guff he’d said in a committee, he told MSPs he wanted to repeat it because “when I read it again, I thought that it was quite balanced”. Such modesty!

RAISED eyebrows at Holyrood yesterday after a nominally Labour-supporting tabloid unveiled its “new star columnist”, one Nicola Sturgeon. In a series of gushing quotes the First Minister managed to name-drop the paper four times, and drooled over its journalistic stance. No mention however of Section 9.29 of the Scottish Ministerial Code, which says ministers must “avoid promoting an individual company’s products or services by association”. Odd that.