Alex salmond

The Kennington Tandoori is a favourite late-night eatery for MPs of all persuasions. Last night was no exception, with Tom Watson spotted planning his bid for deputy leader of Labour over curry and beers, and the SNP’s foreign affairs spokesman Alex Salmond seen enjoying poppadoms with a gaggle of Nats. But word reaches Mr S that all was not well with the restaurant’s seating plan. When the SNP gang arrived, they were somewhat unsettled to find that seated next to their table was a group of  journalists, who were also settling down for a curry. After some furtive glances across the restaurant, the hungry hacks were eventually moved to another table, to ensure they couldn’t listen in on the Scottish Nationalists’

Ahead of the arrival of 56 SNP MPs in Westminster yesterday, Alex Salmond offered his new colleagues some advice in a recent interview. He said: ‘Make your voice heard, represent your constituents, and stay out the Strangers Bar’. So far, so good. In fact, Salmond will no doubt be glad to hear that his fellow MPs have taken his advice and stayed out of the Strangers bar. Instead, they have opted to make Parliament’s sports and social bar their new base. Word reaches Steerpike that a few members of staff had their noses put out of joint last night when the lesser frequented bar was unexpectedly busy. ‘It was packed full of the SNP gang – on a Monday,’

On the radio this morning, Ed Miliband spoke as if he could get a Queen’s Speech passed without speaking to the SNP. This struck some as implausible, but it sounds right to me. Here’s the transcript:- Q: Well let’s just be absolutely clear… neither you nor any of your colleagues will have any conversations with anybody from the SNP at any point after the election. A: We’re not going to negotiate about a Queen’s Speech, no. We’re not going to negotiate with the Scottish National…(Interrupted) Q: Well you’re refining my question a little bit aren’t you. A: I don’t think I am John. You’re asking me whether we’re going to negotiate about

Alex Salmond has been oddly absent from the SNP’s spring conference this weekend. Although the former First Minister’s only official positions are as the MSP for Aberdeenshire East and the PPC for Gordon, it’s puzzling why one of the party’s most prominent figures wasn’t given a prime speaking slot. But that didn’t stop him from trying to steal the show. A small stage was setup in the hall for a Q&A session to promote his new book at lunchtime today. But as soon as Salmond arrived, a combination of sound issues and the ecstatic crowd led him to give up on the side stage and invade the main platform. As

David Cameron is secretly planning for a second coalition, according to the new Spectator. In this week’s View from 22 podcast, James Forsyth and Miranda Green discuss the possibility of another Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition after the general election. Would it be more difficult than it was five years ago to strike a deal? Will the Conservative party back Cameron if he falls short of a majority and decides against a minority government? And why is 30 MPs the magic number for the Liberal Democrats to enter into another coalition? Fraser Nelson and Alex Massie discuss our interview with Alex Salmond and his plans to hold Ed Miliband’s feet to the fire. Instead of doing a coalition deal with Labour,

“Would you like a glass of pink champagne?” asks Alex Salmond at 3.30pm, sounding very much like a man settling down for the afternoon. It’s Monday and Scotland’s former First Minister has cause to celebrate. He spent the previous day musing on television about the price he’d demand for the SNP supporting Ed Miliband in the House of Commons, and his thoughts dominate the front pages of the newspapers. There’s plenty of outrage at the idea of the SNP toying with England, and outrage is exactly what Salmond wanted. So champagne it is. Salmond has found himself an unlikely star of the Tory election campaign; the party this week released

We have been here before, you know. Seven years ago Alex Salmond looked forward to the prospect of a hung parliament and spied an opportunity to ‘make Westminster dance to a Scottish jig’. If Scotland returned at least 20 SNP MPs – members, as the then First Minister indelicately put it, ‘ready, willing, and able to defend our parliament and our people’ – then Scotland’s interests might yet hold the balance of power in London. Not, he stressed, as part of any formal coalition but on a case-by-case and vote-by-vote basis. That didn’t happen, of course. The SNP won only six seats in 2010. Still, a victory delayed is not the

Keith O’Brien, former Cardinal Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, was today stripped of the rank of cardinal by Pope Francis. Technically he has resigned. But the statement above leaves us in little doubt that O’Brien has had the red hat forcibly removed from him. He’s the first cardinal to lose his title since Louis Billot, a French Jesuit who resigned as cardinal in 1927 in protest at the Church’s condemnation of the far-Right anti-Semitic Action Française movement. Billot was the only cardinal to resign in the 20th century. [Update: see discussion in the thread over O’Brien’s title. This he has not lost, de jure, but de facto he is no longer

As the election approaches, politicians will find their diaries packed with various events. It’s an equally busy time for those born with the gift of looking like a politician. ‘I’m lucky that I look like Boris,’ says Drew, a Mayor of London ‘lookalike’ who is on the books at the Susan Scott agency. ‘I often get stopped and while it’s not always pleasant, it’s nowhere near what a David Cameron lookalike I know gets.’ Alas, Boris won’t have Drew’s vote. ‘I may make money out of Boris, but I have never voted for him and that’s not going to change.’ With election party season on the horizon, Mr S has

Labour has decreed today it won’t go into a formal coalition with the SNP, but this won’t stop the Tories from attacking Ed Miliband over the possibility. Despite Miliband’s proclamation that ‘Labour will not go into coalition government with the SNP’ and ‘there will be no SNP ministers in any government I lead’, a Tory source says ‘we’ll continue to campaign on this’. So expect more stunts and adverts highlighting the dangers of any union between Labour and the SNP. Conservative HQ has upped the ante of its Labour/SNP attacks recently, running the Saatchi pocket ad (above) in The Guardian, Independent or New Statesman during Labour’s Manchester conference this weekend, while dressing up Conservative activists in Alex Salmond masks holding Soleros lollies

If mainstream politicians are a bit confused and downbeat at the moment, Scottish Labour MPs are the most miserable of the lot, facing a savaging in constituencies they never thought would slip out of their party’s hands. But last night Ed Miliband gave them reason to be a bit less miserable, just for a little while anyway. On Free Speech, the Labour leader came much closer to ruling out a Labour-SNP coalition than he has before, saying ‘I am saying it’s nonsense. I absolutely am saying it’s nonsense. It’ not gonna… you know… you just said it’. He also pointed out that the SNP had ruled out a coalition with

 Alex Salmond’s brand of populist nationalism involves portraying the Tories as the party of the class enemy. But his latest attack on David Cameron and the TV debates has crossed the line of decency. ‘Like most posh boys, given half a chance, he’ll run away from a fight,’ he said yesterday.  This is bigotry, pure and simple, and Salmond disgraces Scotland with such inverted snobbery. Would he (or anyone else) talk about ‘poor boys’ in such a way?  If Salmond intends to use this line in the general election campaign he will find, as Labour found, that Britain does not share the prejudice which animates some of its politicians. Voters don’t really

This was a landmark week in this long election campaign. It was the first this year in which two pollsters (YouGov and Lord Ashcroft) each posted a Conservative lead outside of the margin of error. A 4 per cent lead for the blues may not sound like much – but it represents the largest Conservative lead on YouGov in more than three years. Indeed, of the 12 polls published so far this March, Labour have led in just 4 – compared to 27 leads out of 39 throughout February. It may be nothing. But I somehow suspect otherwise. If you said to me following the 2010 election that Ukip would

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/the-snp-threat-to-westminster/media.mp3″ title=”Alex Massie and Sebastian Payne discuss what an SNP victory will mean for the union” startat=42] Listen [/audioplayer]Anyone seeking to understand the strength of the SNP should look to those parts of Scotland where the party is supposed to be weakest. At the last election, the nationalists took just under 10 per cent of the vote in the Scottish Borders. This year, Tory canvass returns suggest the SNP may treble its share of the vote in one of the most staunchly unionist seats in Scotland. For months, opinion polls have made unremittingly gloomy reading for unionists. The nationalists are heading for a victory on a scale still not

In some respects David Cameron has been a lucky politician. Lucky that his predecessors had failed so completely that his initial brand of so-called modernisation seemed a punt worth taking. Lucky that he faced Gordon Brown, not Tony Blair. Lucky that he could pivot from ‘sharing the proceeds of growth’ to ‘we’re all in it together’ without too many people noticing (or caring too much). Lucky, above all, that he now faces Ed Miliband. Because however you dress it up, this has not been a happy government. In economic terms – the defining issue of the age – his party has missed many of its most important targets. Functionally-speaking, George