HE always had the physique for it, but yesterday Alex Salmond was installed as the bouncer at the gate of Scotland's nurseries, merrily turning away tearful bairns who only ever wanted to laugh, learn and swap nits.
At least, that was the devilish picture LibDem Willie Rennie drew at FMQs, asking why 130,000 two-year-olds in England get free nursery education, but just a few hundred here.
You imagined quivering tots, damp eyes raised to the Salmond scowl as it peered over the fleshy horizon of his stomach, and a great evil chuckle: "Sorry son, not with those short trousers."
The FM could do more if he wanted, said Rennie, but yoked better childcare to independence.
"He's only going to give two-year-olds what they need when he gets what he wants," he hissed.
Salmond ignored the Scottish angle, said the English scheme was rubbish, and flopped down in a strop. He then fell out with Labour's Johann Lamont over a measly half-billion quid.
That being the sum Nicola Sturgeon left off the official bill for government infrastructure projects - put at £3.3bn not £3.8bn.
"Nicola Sturgeon seems to be running her department with the same competence [as] she's running the Yes campaign," said Lamont.
"She missed half a billion pounds!"
In terms Salmond would understand, that's "nigh on 1000 trips to the Ryder Cup".
Dismissing a "rather tame and insubstantial" attack, Salmond told Lamont to concentrate on the "extraordinary success of the NPD programme".
As NPD stands for Non-Profit Distribution, but increasingly means No Progress Dammit, Labour MSPs were generous in their scorn.
If the SNP can lose £500m, imagine how flawed its independence plans must be, cried Lamont. The FM wobbled like a two-year-old's bottom lip.
"After months of preparation that's the exact equivalent of Johann Lamont's questioning," he burbled, before getting lost in a riff about 1970s oil estimates.
The bouncer had been expertly bounced.
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