There was a lot shouting yesterday about promises made and broken.
They forgot to mention the promise of the cosy chamber in which nasty adversarial politics would be forgotten. Holyrood these days is about as cosy as cage fighting.
Fresh from ejecting Labour's Michael McMahon from the chamber – cheek, squabbling in class, dumb insolence – presiding officer Tricia Marwick was standing no nonsense. At one point she even muttered a warning to McMahon's leader, Johann Lamont, for comparing Alex Salmond to Pinocchio.
Lamont wasn't presenting herself as Wee Jiminy Cricket. She was suggesting that, where facts are concerned, Salmond has got no strings to tie him down. It's what the opposition would like to be known as a character issue.
You know how it goes. Polls have shown that Labour isn't greatly trusted. The same polls have shown that the Tories can only be trusted to lose elections. Where the LibDems are concerned, most people don't even trust the question.
It becomes important, therefore, to show that if Salmond had a wooden nose it would be as long as the Royal Mile. The First Minister hasn't exactly helped himself. In fact, he's amassing quite a record of apologies, misstatements and assertions in need of a rewrite. As he might say, his facts are sometimes chiels liable to ding a bit. Lamont's tactic yesterday – she denounced Salmond thrice on this account – was that if he doesn't know the difference between a college funding increase and a cut he's either incompetent or, in parliamentary parlance, at it.
The First Minister offered an interesting defence. First off, he had only misread a mere briefing paper. So why, asked Lamont, had John Swinney and Mike Russell nodded along with a spectacular inexactitude? Never mind that, responded Salmond. He had apologised, unlike some. Besides, his ministers were under huge pressure from the Westminster system Lamont defends. She didn't care. She wouldn't have cared if Salmond had offered to sit in a corner wearing a big conical hat marked with a D. His style, she said, was to "keep people in the dark, assert the opposite of the truth, and hope that no-one will notice".
Ruth Davidson of the Tories and Willie Rennie of the LibDems fancied a piece of this action. They too chucked their mud pies, praying that something would stick.
Perhaps Salmond will commission a briefing paper to establish whether or not that's true.
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