Someone's been hacking Alex Salmond's phone.
He won't admit it – that would be a disgrace to the British constitution – but you can tell. The First Minister has been getting the wrong messages.
What's worse, they're old messages. One says that Rupert Murdoch is just another businessman. A second runs that shouting the word "jobs" is an answer to every question. A third has it that dubious behaviour by critics excuses your own foibles.
The last message on the Salmond spiritual voice mail actually has merit. Where Murdoch is concerned, all parties are in a damp pit staring towards the moral high ground. True, but irrelevant.
As an excuse, it won't preserve the First Minister for much longer. Yesterday, he clad himself in legal flannel about cross-Border inquiries and left us to believe that he will spill all to Lord Leveson, but share nothing with the parliament by which he sets some store.
Ruth Davidson, for the Tories, got the First Minister with the kind of question he likes least, the straight kind. Was the Salmond phone – the one with "Hielan' Laddie" for its ringtone – hacked or not?
He didn't answer. Nor did he answer when Willie Rennie, for the LibDems, tried the same approach, with the helpful reminder that Salmond is responsible to the parliament of Scotland.
Davidson was told that she had offered an "absolute mince of a question"; Rennie didn't even get that plaudit. Johann Lamont, for Labour, had been warned previously parliament could inquire into nothing whatever as 40 Strathclyde plods have "primacy".
It could have been David Cameron talking. The effect, like the answers, was peculiar. It had Salmond sounding, in Lamont's words, like "the last person left defending Rupert Murdoch".
Leveson would not be fussed if the First Minister reported rodents rummaging in his in-box. The Commons media committee has managed to conduct an inquiry amid three separate Met investigations.
Still the Salmond lip was zipped, buttoned, and welded shut. Even Lamont's jibe the First Minister's "aide", Joan McAlpine, has suffered a phone infestation caused no response.
At one point, after the tale of Ally Salmond and the 40 Plods, the Labour leader said: "I don't think even the First Minister believed that, never mind his back benches." That accounted for the last people liable to believe what they were hearing.
Labour had the name Gordon Brown thrown at them, which was fair enough. The Tories got Cameron and a two-word answer, Andy Coulson. The Liberals got some free hot air.
Later, I played it all back on Sky Plus, doing my bit for irony and Scottish jobs.
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