WE didn’t have long to wait for this week's FMQs protest. In fact, we didn’t wait at all.
The three nippers who yelled in the gallery about housing and climate change shot their bolt before the proceedings even began.
They later issued a statement boasting they had “disrupted First Minister's Questions... for the third time in a month”.
Actually, they bamboozled the fag-end of the glamour-free General Questions session, as Tory backbencher Roz McCall and public finance minister Tom Arthur were in the chair, not Nicola Sturgeon.
Flattering for the warm-up act, but deeply weird for the rest of us. Still, the impetuosity of youth and all that. The confusion which enveloped Ms Sturgeon was less excusable.
On Monday, when asked if double-rapist Adam Graham, who identifies as Isla Bryson, was indeed a woman, Justice Secretary Keith Brown said she was.
“I think that is the case. We have to accept people identify, as in this case, as women.”
Tory leader Douglas Ross asked the FM if she agreed with that. She didn’t.
“I’m not going to get into the individual circumstances of that particular individual’s claims to be a woman, because I don’t have enough information about that,” she said.
On Monday, the Government said only self-identification was required.
Today, Ms Sturgeon said more info was needed to assess such gender “claims”.
Mr Ross asked again if Bryson was a woman. Ms Sturgeon again rewrote policy.
“That individual claims to be a woman; I said that I do not have information about whether those claims have validity.”
After Mr Ross read quotes from one of Bryson’s victims saying she was sure he was a fraud exploiting the system for an easier life in jail, Ms Sturgeon flip-flopped again.
Having been unable to say moments before whether Bryson’s claim to be a woman was valid, she declared it was “almost certainly the case” that it wasn’t.
Her word being law in these parts, it seems self-ID has been replaced by Sturgeon-ID.
She seemed to get her mojo back when Labour’s Anas Sarwar complained skint councils were getting skinter, and in a surprise twist it was all the SNP’s fault.
“The problem for Anas Sarwar is that it is the verdict of the Scottish people that matters, which is why I am standing here and he is sitting over there,” she said, impaling the daft wee mouse on her claws.
But then she blew it again.
“We have put a draft budget before Parliament," she said.
"And I stress that word ‘draft budget’.”
It’s never reassuring when the person in charge of the cash can’t tell the difference between one and two. With skills like that, she could lead the next FMQs protest.
And lost in the fog of her capricious, minute-by-minute logic, she just might.
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