Boris Johnson has fired his first love-bomb at Scotland. And we got to watch it – well, him – explode live on air.
The Prime Minister sent Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove in to Glasgow TV studios yesterday to make nice with North Britain’s rebels. As best he could.
Look, Mr Gove told a succession of hosts, Scots are all far too worried about the Rona bug to fret about some referendum malarkey.
What we want, he told us in a tone so sweet it sounded like he had gargled in honey, is something called “Team UK” which would be “working together” with “laser-focus” on recovery. And Nicola Sturgeon, he repeated several times, after warmly congratulating her on her victory, wanted that too. The pandemic comes first, sure it does.
The BBC’s Andrew Marr, broadcasting his eponymous show from Pacific Quay, was not buying this patter. He just wanted to know if Mr Gove and his boss would go to the courts to try to stop another one of those big independence votes in the courts. And Mr Gove was not for telling him.
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“No,” he answered, "but the thing that is critically important is an acknowledgement on the part of all of us as political leaders, whatever parties we come from, that the priority at the moment is not court cases, it’s not independence legislation, it is recovery from the pandemic”.
Now Mr Gove is Scottish – if you listen carefully you can still hear just the faintest hint of this in his accent – and he reminded us he knew Scottish people and Scottish places. His mum in Aberdeen, he said, was worried about the pandemic recovery, not indy. And, name-dropping Glasgow’s once busiest shopping drag, Mr Gove declared that nobody on Sauchiehall Street was going to stop him and ask him about the Supreme Court. Hey, he’s probably right about that.
In short, Mr Gove was not saying the British Government would try to use the law to stop Indyref2. But he was not saying they would not. Mr Marr pressed. Mr Gove, a former journalist, pushed back, hinting this constitutional crisis talk was media hype. “You’re so anxious to go down that route,” he said, suggesting news people like a bit of “high drama” (we totally do). “It’s where you are,” he said. “It's not where Scotland is.”
Mr Marr – also a London Scot, remember – was determined to get to the heart of the matter: what kind of state is the United Kingdom? Is it a voluntary union nor not? Can Scotland, he asked Mr Gove, allowed to leave the UK? “Of course, it is,” replied Mr Gove. But the Tory minister quickly entered in to what for Scottish viewers was familiar ground: casting doubt on whether pro-independence parties winning a majority of seats – and a majority of list (but not constituency) votes - amounted to a mandate.
Mr Marr’s next guest was sure that it did. Nicola Sturgeon, was not going to let such chat dim her post-election glow.
And she was not for yarning about the Supreme Court either. Well, apart from saying how “absurd and completely outrageous” it would be for the Tories to use the law to stop her.
She said: “For this to end up in court, which is not something I ever want to see, it would mean a Conservative government had refused to respect the democratic wishes of the Scottish people and the outcome of a democratic election and tried to go to the Supreme Court to overturn Scottish democracy.”
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Mr Marr was not for letting her off with this. He even put a section of the 1998 Scotland Act – the part that left the future of the Union in the hands of Westminster – on his smart screen. Ms Sturgeon did not rise. Experts, she said, disagree about whether a referendum would be legal. But, she was as keen as Mr Gove not to talk about the Supreme Court. “I don’t think we will get anywhere near this,” she said when discussing legal rows. Why? The implications of such a UK move, she said, would be “very grave”.
There was a final question which might have darkened Ms Sturgeon’s mood. About her mentor and predecessor, Putin TV host Alex Salmond, whose Alba Party had bombed, with no love, in the elections. Could she be reconciled with him? No, it seems. “It is a source of great sadness,” she said.
As Ms Sturgeon spoke Mr Gove made his way across Pacific Quay to BBC Scotland’s The Sunday Show. His comfy seat was replaced by a three-leg stool but the questions and answers were more or less the same. Presenter Martin Geissler was told he too liked the “drama” of constitutional politics. And then – in a role reversal – under pressure Mr Gove joked that he found Mr Geissler’s opinions “fascinating” but wished to inject some “facts” in to the discussion.
Fellow guest Anas Sarwar was not impressed. He was relaxed, tieless and smiling – presumably in sheer relief that his defeat had not been a rout and that Labour was “back on the pitch”. Mr Gove was a “master of spin”, he said, his interview had been “comedic”.
Yet despite all the love-bombing and speculation about court actions it was Mr Geissler’s chat with Ms Sturgeon’s depute, Keith Brown, that might just be tone-setting. Because it touched on the substantive and knotty issues of independence: currency, central banking and borders. Now that really is “high drama”.
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