There was something odd going on in the Scottish Parliament yesterday, and it was Alex Salmond. The first one to spot it was Iain Gray, whom we will now stop calling “the Labour leader” because everyone knows that by now.
Mr Gray, the Labour leader, noticed that the First Minister’s voice had dropped to something approaching whisper level. That is, whisper level on the Salmond decibel scale which is still pretty loud for most of us but deuced soft for Salmond. Mr Gray promptly pointed out that the First Minister was using his quiet voice and made some quip about how that wouldn’t help him evade his questions, which were about cancelled NHS operations.
Maddeningly, for Mr Gray, the man whom we may now have to refer to as The Quiet Man of Scottish Politics carried on talking quietly. Well, for a bit anyway, then he got bored with it. But you saw what he was trying to do. By speaking in a low and meaningful monotone, he was indicating that the subject — the health service — was above party bickering.
Indeed, at one stage he actually said that the question of postponed operations or staff numbers in the health service was too important to be used to score party political points. And no one burst out laughing. Or rather if they did, they laughed so softly it was inaudible. There may well have been another reason for Mr Salmond’s low tone. Ahead of him lay a spectacular U-turn. In precisely five hours his party would abandon its long-held opposition to the Calman reforms to support them instead. He knew it, even if the rest of us didn’t.
Of course there is some logic to the SNP’s decision. After all, Mr Salmond’s nationalism has long been of the step-by-step variety. He famously supported devolution as his second choice after independence. He believes in the long game.
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Under this model, embracing Calman and his brand of fiscal devolution made sense too.
Still it was awfully last minute and he knew that when it all came out it would be awfully embarrassing. A lot to be quiet about, eh?