MORE news on Scottish Labour’s new spin doctor Alan Roden. With the party skint, Red Roddo has been poring over the press office budget, we hear. One wheeze was to save £2 a day by no longer buying The Guardian. This was met with lefty uproar Chez Kez and Roddo was forced to back down. The paper he used to work for, The Daily Mail, remains safe however, as does The Herald, which Roddo now checks in terror each week for diary stories.
//
LIKE the one about him being unable to tie his own shoelaces. Unspun is unsure whether to believe him or not, but Roddo insists this test of basic competence is beyond him. “I couldn’t do it as a kid, so I gave up and now only wear slip-ons or shoes with Velcro,” he says. Still, if you work for Scottish Labour, it’s what you avoid stepping in that counts, not the footwear.
\\
ALSO treading carefully is the famously hustings-phobic MSP Fulton ‘No Show’ MacGregor. An SNP mole highlights his Facebook page, which is full of eerie pictures of him hovering over the streets of Coatbridge for the ‘22 Push Up Challenge’. As our source puts it: “Usually, he’s the No Show at events, but it looks like his date didn’t turn up for the missionary position.”
//
IN the week Great British Bake Off replaced the news, subversive sponge-based politics made a timely appearance at Holyrood. A huge photograph appeared in the lobby of the Parliament in cake form. This turned out to be a recent entrant to Stirling’s CakeFest 2016. Every sugary detail seemed perfect - except one. The flagpole carrying the EU flag had been knocked over. A comment on Brexit, Unspun suspects. But whether by a Remainer or a Leaver is unclear.
\\
Whitehall's finest are taking a keen interest in the Brexit manoeuvrings, we hear, with civil servants opening a book on which of the three Brexiteers gets the boot first. Early favourite is International Trade Secretary Liam Fox, recently caught slagging off Britain’s captains of industry as "too lazy and too fat”. But given Brexit Secretary David Davis also made a gaffe over the single market and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson rarely has his foot far from his mouth, we fear the East Kilbride-born Dr Fox is facing some hard competition.
//
PRITI Patel, the new International Development Secretary, promised to work constructively with the SNP administration in Edinburgh this week. Fine words, but rather let down by her calling them the Scottish Nationalist Party, something the Scottish National Party can’t abide.
\\
ARE opposition MSPs at Holyrood even worth knowing? Apparently not, at least according the 'Scotrail Alliance', a partnership between Dutch operator Abellio and Network Rail. It is organising a swanky dinner next week, but it's exclusively for Nats. Unfortunately, it trusted John Mason, who when not making embarrassing gaffes on his Twitter account uses it to whinge about trains, to send out the invites. The email landed in every rival MSP's inbox, leading blooper-prone Mason to rush out a hurried retraction blaming "my and my staff’s inability to operate the email system properly."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here