THE good news for Labour was that they had a joke up their sleeve, no matter what date the First Minister sprung on us for the referendum.
The bad news is they got James Kelly to deliver it. Mr Kelly is to comedic timing what Genghis Khan was to flower arranging. It was like watching a mugger creep up on a granny, only to find she had a taser and a baseball bat.
"What Alex Salmond has done today is announce the date of his own retirement," said Mr Kelly, only to be reminded that Labour had form in wrongly predicting the demise of the FM.
There had been an eerie silence as Mr Salmond began to speak, with the Opposition sullen and even the SNP troops seemingly too anxious to make a peep. Instead, the only sound was the Press Gallery frantically rustling through copies of the speech, only to find the date redacted.
How Ministers must have taken satisfaction in that thwarting of the hated media, forcing them to wait several minutes more.
The Labour leader started well – "If the hand of history is on the First Minister's shoulder I wish it would give him a shove and he'd get on with it" – but it allowed the comeback: "The hand of history appears to have missed out Johann Lamont altogether."
Labour's Patricia Ferguson complained that the courtesy copy of the speech given to the Opposition in advance was similarly redacted, as if having kept the date secret even from his own backbenchers he was going to hand it to his enemies.
But the questions and answers deteriorated to the point where an irate Margo MacDonald complained that such a big question required everyone to up their game.
"Can we big it up, Presiding Officer?" Never mind, only 545 days of this to go.
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