Bull detector

Boris Johnson continued his run of bizarre photo-ops in Banchory yesterday by struggling to pose with a temperamental Salers bull. The Salers Cattle Society boasts the breed’s males “are known for their ability to cover large numbers of females”. We’ll say no more.

Island Life

TORY MSP Jamie Halcro Johnston miscalculated badly on Thursday when he ribbed Communities Secretary Aileen Campbell about the FM only visiting Shetland during elections. The government takes all communities seriously, she replied. “I should also point out that my in-laws are from Shetland and my husband is a Shetlander, so Jamie Halcro Johnston has picked the wrong person to tell that they are not engaging with the matter of visits to Shetland.” Ouch.

Gimme shed-ter

TALKING of Shetland, LibDem MSP Alex Cole-Hamilton wound up lots of SNP activists in the recent byelection there with his, er, colourful tweets. His gift for spin also shows on Airbnb, where Superhost Alex is touting a “self-contained cabin in Edinburgh’s West End” for £50 a night. Call us naive, but it looks awfully like a converted shed in his back garden. No doubt he has a LibDem bar chart showing it’s the best in the city.

Labour trains

ALSO up north recently was Conrad ‘Smooth’ Landin, Scotland Editor of the Morning Star. The voice of the proletariat tweeted a pic of himself on Thursday’s Caledonian Sleeper sipping an “obligatory lounge car whisky”, a cheeky Macallan. Good practice for his new job as a Scottish Labour press chief perhaps, a position liable to drive any occupant to sink “the many not the few”. They even give you a poisoned chalice.

Old Foulkes Home

THE great, the good and the decrepit of Scottish Labour turned out for the launch of Gordon Brown’s Union Jack thinktank Our Scottish Future last week. Peer George Foulkes asked when the Lords would be replaced by an elected senate “so I can retire at last?”. Compere Jim Gallagher deadpanned: “Well, if we were looking for any objective George, we’ve just found one.”