Things aren’t exactly going well for Nicola Sturgeon at the moment, with bin strikes underway across Scotland leaving half the country festering under piles of rubbish.
Which perhaps explains why the First Minister was so keen to skip the country yesterday, leaving the difficult business of government behind her to open a glitzy new Scottish ‘Nordic office’ in Copenhagen. The office is the ninth Scottish ‘international hub’, and is expected to cost £600,000 a year. Exactly why Scotland needs a Nordic office is rather less clear to Steerpike – but one rather suspects that endless amounts of taxpayer money can be bunged away in Scotland as long as it helps Nicola Sturgeon pretend to be a statesman on the world stage.
To that end, Sturgeon was aided admirably by the National newspaper this weekend, which is currently in full SNP-Pravda mode.

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