James dornan

If James Dornan did not exist, Mr Steerpike would surely invent him, for the SNP MSP for Glasgow Cathcart is so fantastically absurd that he supplies endless (and endlessly entertaining) copy. Dornan is in the news again, this time for pronouncing that the BBC’s Sarah Smith imagined the abuse and misogyny she experienced while covering Scottish politics. During her tenure as the Beeb’s Scotland Editor, Smith was turned into a hate figure by cybernats, the digital foot soldiers of Scottish nationalism who target opposition politicians, journalists and anyone else out of step with Nicola Sturgeon’s inclusive, progressive Scotland. Smith, who is heading to the US to become the BBC North

Well 2021 is at an end and what a hell of a year it’s been. There were laughs, tears, shock, disgust and despair – and that was just the reaction to footage of Matt Hancock’s video nasty. The past twelve months have seen various ups and downs in Britain and abroad, ranging from the highlights of the vaccine rollout and England’s Euro run to low points like the Capitol coup, the Afghanistan debacle and various pandemic pitfalls. And Mr S has been there throughout it all to chart the gossip, drama, high politics and low shenanigans. Tony Benn once sniffed that it was ‘issues, not personalities’ that mattered; Steerpike holds that the inverse is true when

Ping! An email in Steerpike’s inbox lands, subject line: ‘SNP’s attack on refs.’ Is this, at last, a moment of nationalist self-reflection? Have the 45 per cent-ers finally clocked most Scots don’t want another plebiscite? Could some SNP drone finally have switched off the autopilot to question the wisdom of a neverendum? Sadly for Scotland, the answer to all these questions is: no. For it seems that James Dornan, the hard-of-thinking MSP who frequently features in Steerpike’s pages, is once again up to his usual tricks. Dornan of course is the ‘racist buses’ conspiracy theorist who claimed in June that an Edinburgh transport company had stopped services on St Patrick’s Day because of

It’s been some months since Mr S last reported on the antics of James Dornan, the SNP MSP and amateur Hate-Finder General. The gaffe-prone Glaswegian managed, in the space of just one week, to get himself embroiled in multiple minor scandals after accusing an Edinburgh bus company had stopped services on St Patrick’s Day because of ‘anti-Irish racism’ (an untrue claim for which he had no evidence) and then for refusing to apologise for claiming Rangers’ players had sung a sectarian tune (another untrue claim based on poorly-doctored footage). Three weeks later he also told the Catholic leader of the Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg: ‘If your God exists you will undoubtedly

One of the benefits of devolution has been giving Scots their own parliament in which the great issues of the day can be discussed. Issues that might not otherwise make it onto the political agenda. Now the Scottish parliament has posed a question that can be avoided no longer: are buses racist? James Dornan is the SNP MSP for Glasgow Cathcart and the man who has brought these matters to light. Speaking in a debate at Holyrood last week, Dornan raised the enduring blight of ‘institutional prejudice’ against Irish Catholics in Scotland. He could have cited many examples in evidence but admirably chose to make a more original case: ‘To