If Boris Johnson was watching this debate he may well have remarked: “Cripes, this lot spend more time talking about me than talking about what’s happening in Scotland.”
Certainly Johnson and his “bunch of Brexiteers”, as Nicola Sturgeon termed them, were given a lot of camera time last night. Division has become a running theme in this election; Sturgeon and her ally Patrick Harvie, for the Greens, were united in their belief that BoJo was at the heart of most of what is going wrong in Scotland.
There is, however, a difficulty here. The more Sturgeon blames the prime minister, the greater her difficulty in persuading us that hers is a party that brings Scotland together. As a result her rivals seemed to have a strategy of “let’s get Sturgeon”. Douglas Ross for the Tories, the Lib Dem Willie Rennie and Anas Sarwar for Labour took turns asking the first minister how she could help the Scotland recover while pushing an early referendum.
Ross had the most ground to make up. He is largely thought to have blown it last time by ramping up the referendum question at every opportunity. This time he adopted a softer, even sibilant approach, and the most striking moment of the evening was probably his litany of issues on which, he suggested, the SNP had failed. The party had been in power for 14 years, he said, but what progress had they made on any policy from Ross’s long list? “On all of them,” Sturgeon claimed limply. It neither sounded convincing nor answered the question.
Sarwar, who was hailed as the best performer last time, never quite pulled it off, though his challenge to Sturgeon on the Glasgow hospital scandal brought a tell-tale flush to her cheek. Sarwar was at his most effective in the previous debate when he accused Ross of obsessing about the referendum, so he had to soft-pedal that line of attack when it came to challenging the SNP. By now Ross had found answer on this one: He simply uses the R word — recovery — at every available opportunity. Mainly, it works.
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The STV format is better than the BBC’s. It asks each leader to face questions from their rivals, and since they have been over this ground many times in parliament each knows where the weak spots are. Thus Sturgeon is weak on education, Ross is weak on the powers of the UK government to sideline Scottish policies, Sarwar is weak on whether he thinks an SNP majority would justify a call for another referendum, Harvie is weak on North Sea oil jobs, Rennie is weak on — well, actually, he is a doughty performer but his drawback is being a Lib Dem.
One lesson everyone seems to have learnt is when to say sorry. It’s quite an effective ploy and blunts most attacks. Thus Sturgeon apologised for her failure to tackle the drugs issue and Ross apologised for being horrid about Gypsy Travellers.
A winner? None really, except that Sturgeon, by insisting that her interest rests wholly on getting the country through the Covid crisis, has a pretty good story to tell. If the nation is listening, this is one it is likely to remember.
