Only the most suspicious cynic would dare to suggest this was a convenient week for Douglas Ross to volunteer for a spell of self-isolation. The Tory leader discovered hours before first minister’s questions that he had been in the vague proximity of someone who is carrying the virus — Covid, I mean, not Downing Street — and so he took part in the weekly grudge match from an undisclosed location.
Attack is the best part of defence, sometimes. So Ross adopted a tone of unusual concern and injury when asking Nicola Sturgeon if she agreed with her wee colleague Patrick Harvie that extracting oil and gas from the north sea basin was now an enterprise supported only by “the hard right”.
If Ross hoped to drive a wedge between the first minister and her coalition colleagues he was to be disappointed. Sturgeon pointedly refused to engage with the substance of his question. If, on the other hand, he wished to tie the SNP and the Greens together, tarnishing the former with their association with the latter he was, perhaps, more successful.
Did the first minister not appreciate how “hurtful” Harvie’s comments had been? Not everyone who works in the oil and gas sector is a neo-fascist. Honestly, these Tories are such snowflakes.
Dividing lines are all the rage, however, and Sturgeon was later given the opportunity — courtesy of an interminable question from the Green MSP Gillian Mackay — to say what she thought of Boris Johnson. Surprisingly, her verdict was not altogether positive. “I defy anyone to look at the broken, corrupt, self-serving Westminster system that we are currently part of,” she said, “and conclude that is provides a secure basis for the future of Scotland”. At this point an unpatriotic thought came to mind: this was bold talk from a first minister who, in the view of a committee of her parliamentary peers, was guilty of misleading her own parliament. But perhaps this too was the sort of awkwardness only a cynic would dare to contemplate.
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Boris should go, the first minister said, and on this — albeit for different reasons — she and Ross might yet find some common ground.
