Holyrood Sketch: Tavish Scott, the Liberal leader, is deeply concerned about corporate decision-making and its malign impact on jobs in Scotland. Couldn't the man have come up with something actually rib-tickling to assist a poor sketch-writer?
Tavish Scott, the Liberal leader, is deeply concerned about corporate decision-making and its malign impact on jobs in Scotland.
Couldn't the man have come up with something actually rib-tickling to assist a poor sketch-writer?
But no - and I've checked the spelling -Mr Scott is talking about bankers. With a B. An important matter, clearly, when bottom lines, asset-stripping, decency, unemployment, and Christmas all loom within the same cold month.
Elsewhere, Labour's leader, Iain Gray, is attempting to assert that the SNP administration is somewhat cavalier in its handling of rail franchises.
Specifically: "headlines alleging cronyism"; "a nod and a wink"; and even - deplorable in our modern Scotland - a "conflict of interest at the heart of it".
Mr Salmond retorts that Audit Scotland is well-pleased with the First Bus Rail Now Take the Bus deal, that Mr Gray saw it all coming, and that fares here are less absurd than elsewhere. And no-one is being fired for anything.
Annabel Goldie, a Tory who can remember when arbitrary mass unemployment was a fad, thinks she knows how to prevent people from becoming sick in hospitals. She believes an Aberdeen Infirmary wheeze to track ailing patients electronically can be "rolled out", and what's the problem?
Oddly, Mr Scott takes much the same attitude towards the bankers - with a B - at Lloyds TSB. Mr Salmond does not demur seriously in either case.
Consensus has broken out like a rash. I may even re-employ my former cliches.
Labour believe - a paraphrase will have to do - that there is something dodgy about the way in which this SNP government does business. The Liberals have acquired a sub- Nationalist hue in the financial crisis. The Tories just wish that people in power would get a grip. Re-arrange those thoughts and you have - as one likes to think of it - Etch-a-Holyrood-Sketch. Or perhaps a CV.
A First Minister's CV, you understand. Mr Salmond has talked nonsense, conspicuously, about his desire for consensus.
Yesterday he barely even attempted to dispute Mr Gray's point about the number of ministers it takes to placate blustering Americans. He does not pick fights with Mr Scott, meanwhile, and he has a place in his heart for Ms Goldie. And somehow serious issues still get aired.
Nothing much is achieved, of course. That is not the real point of First Minister's Questions. Once we were promised something "less adversarial" than Westminster, but no-one fell for that.
