Alex Salmond Inquiry

I Don’t Like Mondays

I Don’t Like Mondays

Like Bob Geldof and the Boomtown Rats, I don’t like Mondays, but today has been more depressing than usual. The first setback was hearing the BBC describe Nicola Sturgeon being cleared by an ‘independent’ inquiry. The second was reading an op-ed in The Times by Alex Massie, the Spectator’s Scottish editor, describing the SNP as “exhausted but irreplaceable.”

The riposte to the first has to be that if this was an inquiry into Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin, or almost anyone else, the BBC would not use the word ‘independent’ about an inquiry by an inquisitor carefully selected by the accused and limited by very delicately confined terms of reference before delivering a report that is at odds even with the leaked conclusions of the Kafkaesque Parliamentary Inquiry, which is then so heavily redacted as to be meaningless.

Pull up. Pull up.

Pull up. Pull up.

Like many of us who now find ourselves locked inside for most of the day, I have been watching more movies than usual. A few nights ago, one struck me with its resonance to current Scottish politics. It was about an aircraft that, mid-flight, suffered a catastrophic malfunction to its tail assembly, causing it to roll over and enter a steep dive that inverted all of its controls; actions that would have previously lifted the nose of the aircraft would only push it down further. As the pilots fought the controls, a clear but plaintive mechanical voice repeats, "Pull up. Pull up," as the plane hurtles to the ground, as if the pilots hadn't already realised the situation which they were now powerless to stop.