USUALLY as sure-footed as a mountain goat on Strictly, Nicola Sturgeon endured two bad wobbles and a bellyflop at FMQs today.
Perhaps because her usual partner, John Swinney, was missing from her side.
The first slip came after Kezia Dugdale tore into her for promising to double free childcare in the next parliament while parents couldn’t find places in the current system, and council budgets for new nurseries were falling.
“The First Minister’s childcare policy is a mess,” said the Labour leader.
Never fear, said the FM, the budgets hadn’t been cut, they’d been “re-profiled”.
Once the hollow laughter abated, Ms Sturgeon argued at least she had a childcare policy: “There ain’t no alternative from the Labour party whatsoever.”
Ms Dugdale wrinkled her nose at the answer as if it were a dirty nappy.
“There we go. It’s not a 56 per cent cut, it’s just been re-profiled. Isn’t the SNP’s childcare plan just one great big con?”
Ms Sturgeon insisted all was braw with the bairns, then attacked Labour again, just in case.
Tory Ruth Davidson highlighted a 70 per cent drop in school inspections. At the present rate it'll take Education Scotland’s clipboard jockeys 19 years to visit them all.
Didn’t parents deserve full info from a proper inspectorate?
Again, inconvenient evidence aside, Ms Sturgeon was certain all was well.
“I am much more ambitious on transparency that Ruth Davidson,” she said opaquely.
After backbench questions about job losses in oil, fishing and - gulp - the media, LibDem leader Willie Rennie brought up Amazon, which has a vast warehouse in his Fife patch.
Why did the SNP government give it a £1m grant when the firm doesn’t pay the living wage?
Clearly expecting a poser about Amazon’s other claim to fame - tax avoidance - Ms Sturgeon read unthinkingly from a script that omitted wages, but tutted five times about tax.
“I know the FM finds it difficult to listen to anyone else. The question was about wages, not tax,” said Mr Rennie, adding staff at the Dunfermline mega-shed felt it was an “exceptionally horrible” place where employment agencies plundered wage packets.
“Why does the Scottish government give Amazon four times as much money to pay low wages as it gives the Poverty Alliance to champion the living wage?”
The FM apologised for having “misheard” his question, and said firmly that her government was “standing up for decent wages for everyone”, even when it patently wasn’t.
Why, in Roseanna Cunningham, she even had the UK’s only Cabinet Secretary for Fair Work!
However having a policy, or a minister, and having an effect are always not the same thing.
The FM says she wants to run on her record in May; but how do you run on quicksand?
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