The police are a law unto themselves

The journos weren’t very impressed with Nicola Sturgeon’s house. Never mind the plod staring like morons at her barbecue or heaving out sacks of half-completed pools coupons to their summer marquee on the front lawn – the southern hacks were more interested in the paucity of this real estate. Her house was, we were assured, ‘modest’ and ‘humble’ and ‘unfashionable’, and most damningly of all, a ‘new-build’. Actually, not most damningly of all – that would be ‘on a new-build estate’. They were clearly appalled that it wasn’t a Georgian rectory in three acres of manicured lawns with a cottage garden, or that it didn’t have a basement kitchen-diner.

Are these people not aware that this is the sort of house where their readers, viewers and listeners live – if they are lucky – and so the scorn is both insulting and a bit of a giveaway? Sturgeon’s gaff is valued at £360,000 – almost double the average price of a home in Scotland and about £70,000 dearer than the average across the UK. It was the contempt or astonishment with which the phrase ‘new-build estate’ was used that did it for me, though – not least because almost everybody in the country seems to be demanding that the government build millions more of these on greenfield sites and particularly in the green belt. Everybody accepts that these homes are ghastly, but we need housing for the plebs and the Albanians.

The plod – the rozzers, the filth, your call – were doing their usual performative thing, looking like sacks of meat with mittens, shrouded in self-importance but still appearing dimmer than those new lightbulbs we are forced to use which will, in time, ensure we all need spectacles.