Christopher Harvie (Fife, author and MSP): 'Don't mention the Woman!' could have been the silent sentence in David Cameron's 'ugly stain of separation' speech of Tuesday 11 December in Edinburgh. The days when 'TBW' was a Conservative-generated acronym for 'That Bloody Woman' are long past, but the Scottish Tory party is polling under a third of the UK level. Little improvement in its fortunes will result from Cameron's initiative.
The fingerprints are all over Suave Dave’s encomium of the Union: too close to the style of his friend Andrew Roberts to be credible. Roberts’ neglect of Scotland in his right-wing histories typifies the insularity of London Tories: further away than Lord Home in the 1960s. In 2007, after years of quiet inertia, the party can't change.
Recent SNP gains haven't been at Labour's expense – or at least not directly. The SNP stands at 40%, an increase of 5%, while Labour sits on 29%, not otherwise moving. Just like North Sea oil in the 1970s, renewables – wind, wave, tidal power – are coming on to the scene as the Next Big Economic Thing.
The Telegraph's efforts in defence of the Union could have been better: the London vertigo inspired that decent novelist Andrew O’Hagan to throw a wobbly at Scottish election time, but he has clout as a reporter: unlike the ineffable Roberts, or Gerald Warner, a neo-Jacobite headbanger who wrote a deeply silly history of the Scottish Tories in 1988. The big beasts of northern unionism, Allan Massie and Michael Fry, are still wary of the SNP, but judge that tolerable union might, in an incorrigibly unfederal polity, mean sovereign states allying.
Alex Salmond isn't infallible, although he's more interesting than any Westminster contemporary and his minority ministry has ended government from the Heathrow VIP lounge. His current, rather embarrassing dalliance with Donald Trump and his preposterous Aberdeenshire golf course oddly echoes the Union's nabobs and press barons. While the English LibDem ejected from the chair of the Aberdeen planning committee is a more genuine thrawn Scot than many SNPers who salivate at greens, bunkers and dollars. We are doing things differently here.
At 12%, who’s bothered about the Tories? Think rather about Labour, and Gordon Brown wandering like Wotan across the set of The Wizard of Oz. Labour’s munchkin count is high, yet the grand, distracted figure can’t recognise or court Europe; although France and Germany are the only places that will rebuild infrastructure and get the renewables revolution on the go. The German state railways are running the UK’s rail freight, Electricite de France is lighting London. English Tories have adopted the unalluring Scots habit of girning at this fate, conjuring up for some reason Betjeman’s line ‘This is the last night of the Crazy Gang’. Not quite, but we’re getting there
