Merciless Nicola would make a meal of Miliband
TO Queen Bee’s hive: the Scottish Parliament, demesne of potentially the most powerful woman in Britain, Nicola Sturgeon. At noon yesterday she took half an hour of First Minister’s Questions.
In svelte burgundy suit and nude power shoes, she commanded the airy Chamber before even saying a word.
Above and around were the modernist squiggles and ceiling beams of what might have started life on the architect’s pad as a Bond villain’s ski lodge.
But all attention was focused on this slender, un-mumsy, dirigiste figure, perched forward on her large seat, legs crossed, sipping water from a highball glass.
Everyone watched her – watched the back of her Bay City Rollers hairdo, her Thunderbirds-puppet gestures, the slender hands curled under her pointy chin.
Beside her sat her best friend Shona Robison, Scotland’s Health Secretary and married to SNP deputy leader Stuart Hosie.
What with Miss Sturgeon’s own husband being SNP chief executive, it’s a wee world, north of the Tweed. Yet soon ( if Ed Miliband scrapes enough seats) these two couples may trump the choice of millions of voters elsewhere in the UK.
First Minister’s Questions proved less noisy than PMQs at Westminster.
They have a rather sweet habit of announcing any distinguished visitors. Thus, yesterday, we heard presiding officer Tricia Marwick say that the Indonesian ambassador was in the VIPs’ gallery.
As in a game show, His Excellency stood to accept the applause. Perhaps an English ambassador will sit there one day.
The central wodge of the Chamber was SNP territory, Nationalist Members sitting there at desks with little microphones.
The average age seemed older than Westminster. One of the creakers on the SNP side, Chic Brodie, could have been an OAP Elvis Presley.
To Miss Sturgeon’s right: a few Tories, Lib Dems, a Green, one oatmealy Independent; on Miss Sturgeon’s left (geographically) sat Labour, about 15 of them, glum. Labour’s leader, Jim Murphy, is not in this House.
Questions were therefore led by his deputy, Kezia Dugdale – hesitant voice, timid manner. How remote the days of rampaging Scots-Labour supremacy seem.
Miss Dugdale and her Lib Dem counterpart, Willie Rennie, accused the SNP of wanting to hold another Scottish independence referendum.
Miss Sturgeon laughed, snorted, ridicul- ing her opponents. ‘I thought Kezia Dugdale was going to ask a serious question!’ she scoffed. ‘Labour should desist from negativity and scaremongering.
‘I find it quite sad watching the demise of a once-great party.’
YETjust an hour earlier, former SNP deputy leader Jim Sillars had demanded a push for another referendum, pronto. Miss Sturgeon, ice entering that taut, tight voice, said Sillars was old news. ‘I am now the leader.’ Of Alex Salmond, her predecessor, there was no sign. She’s a merciless operator, this one. She’d do to Ed Miliband what Mongolian chefs do to mutton: kebab and speed-broil him on the flames of her flashing eyes.
Her language about the referendum was chosen, it could be noted, with care. She left fully open the chance of another push for Scottish home rule. As it ended, she left the Chamber the undoubted ruler of this thanedom, the old men parting before her like the Red Sea under Moses’ staff.
In the bar afterwards, I just had time to bump into Sir Jamie McGrigor, Bart., an old-school Highlands and Islands Tory. Was every Westminster seat really about to go SNP? Sir Jamie, sucking down a bucket of lunchtime vino collapso, shrugged.
When he first fought a seat in 1997 he had been told by a crowing Labour man that the Scots Tories were ‘as rare as corncrakes’. Yet now, thanks to sparky Tory leader Ruth Davidson, they are almost polling the same as Labour.
And with that the splendid baronet (an amateur folk singer) burst into a song he had written about Labour and the SNP, the Gallic chorus of which I had better not tell you because it was saltier than the briny off the Isle of Mull.