Stephen Daisley

I have celebrated John Bercow, eulogised Martin McGuinness and urged Spectator readers to vote Labour. So I appreciate I’m on thin ice with a defence of Jo Brand, and since the hefty lefty and I are of similar girth, that metaphor could end badly. Yet the news she is being investigated by police over a joke ought to bring even the most phlegmatic conservative to the barricades. Some things are just wrong, even if Brendan O’Neill is against them too.  Appearing as a guest on Radio 4 panel programme Heresy on Tuesday, Brand riffed on the phenomenon of ‘milkshaking’, in which progressives throw chilled beverages over people they disagree with because when they go low, we go high.

You might not have realised from his lack of appearances but Boris Johnson is standing to be Tory leader. There are MPs on the left of the party, and so he’s told them he’s a One Nationer. There are MPs on the right of the party, and so he’s told them he’s a tax-cutter. And what a tax-cutter he is. Johnson says in this morning’s Daily Telegraph that he wants to hike the higher rate income tax threshold from £50,000 to £80,000. This, the paper estimates, will cost £9.6bn annually and will be paid for using the £26.6bn fund for No Deal Brexit preparations and by raising National Insurance contributions. So far, so Tory, but what about Scotland?

The Conservative Party was founded 185 years ago and may not survive the next five. YouGov and Opinium both put the Tories in third place and on less than 20 per cent of the vote. They managed just 8.8 per cent in the European election, coming fifth behind the Greens and losing all but four of their MEPs. The primary cause of la crise actuelle is the government’s failure to deliver Brexit and it is to this which much of the Tory leadership conversation is addressed. However, there are other factors, structural and social, which have depressed the Tory vote and candidates to replace Theresa May are keen to prove they can win voters back to their party’s tarnished brand.

Brexit may yet kill the Conservative party but it is exacting a cruel psychological torture on liberalism. Liberals are supposed to be the measured voice of reason – earnest, insufferable but reliably level-headed. Not anymore. Liberals – or at least some of them – have gone quite mad over Brexit. There is almost no intrigue they will not seize on if it might explain away the last three years. TV historian Dan Snow tweeted a photograph of his postal ballot and the Brexit Party leaflet he claimed had been delivered inside the same envelope. When celebrity Twitter flicks on its blue-tick sirens, craven officialdom comes running but they brought bad news.

In August 2007, three months after coming to power at Holyrood, the SNP launched its National Conversation on Scotland’s constitutional future. We have been talking about little else since. Among the many national conversations postponed is one on immigration. The CBI has tried to kick-start such a discussion by warning that, within 20 years, just one third of Scotland’s population will be of working age. Given that figure is currently 64 per cent, it is an arresting claim. It is also entirely plausible. The Office for National Statistics predicts the number of working-age Scots to grow by just one per cent between now and 2041, while the pensioner population is expected to surge by 25 per cent.

‘It is better to ride the tiger's back than let it rip your throat out’ is reputedly how Tony Blair rationalised his close relationship with the Sun. The quote is thrown back at him by critics who imagine their preferred mode of politics untainted by tiger-riding. In fact, Blair is not alone: Bill Clinton rode the tiger of white male independents then spent much of his presidency pandering to them on crime, welfare and ‘values’.  For the Liberal Democrats, it was post-Iraq Labour discontents and students, who brought them two million votes across two elections and who turned on them when they teamed up with the Tories and put up tuition fees.

Joan McAlpine is an unlikely rebel against the Scottish political establishment. The SNP MSP is chair of Holyrood’s culture and external affairs committee, a former parliamentary aide to Alex Salmond and a past editor of the Sunday Times Scotland. She has a reputation as a firebrand Nationalist and, in the interests of full disclosure, I have previously been disobliging about her in print. Her exile has been quick, brutal and, inevitably in these days of viewpoint-patrolling, the result of voicing an incorrect opinion. McAlpine is gender-critical, or, in the prosecutorial terms of her detractors, a trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF).

Jews are familiar with the malice, prejudice and stupidity that governs the Labour Party’s complaints process when it comes to anti-Semitism. They will find no comfort in the news that other allegations of racism get short shrift too, even when the complainant is a prominent Labour politician. The party has said there is no case to answer against a councillor accused of telling Labour MSP Anas Sarwar that Scotland wasn’t ready to vote for a ‘Paki’. The incident is alleged to have occurred in 2017, when Sarwar contested the Scottish leadership against left-wing union fixer (and eventual victor) Richard Leonard. Sarwar went public with his claim and Davie McLachlan, then Labour leader on South Lanarkshire Council, was suspended.

There’s an episode of Father Ted in which the simple but endearing Father Dougal gets stuck on a milk float booby-trapped with a bomb. The finest clerical minds in Craggy Island convene to devise a solution and as they discount each increasingly far-fetched fix, the well-meaning Father Beeching pipes up: ‘Is there anything to be said for another Mass?’. Nicola Sturgeon evidently studied at the Beeching Seminary for Crisis Management. Every time there’s an SNP conference looming, her advisors agonise over how to string along the Yes faithful a little longer, until the boss sighs: ‘Is there anything to be said for another Indyref 2 statement?

It was once said that every Jewish holiday could be summed up with the same nine words: ‘They tried to kill us. They failed. Let’s eat’. Now it only takes eight: ‘A Labour spokesperson apologised for any offence caused’. On Friday, the Labour party tweeted warm wishes to Jews celebrating Passover. At this stage, most Jews are glad to receive any communication from Corbyn supporters that doesn’t ask where the Rothschilds were on 9/11, but the well-meaning post contained a blunder: the accompanying graphic showed the Star of David, a cup of wine and... a loaf of bread.  Under halakha — Jewish religious law — bread is the ultimate forbidden food during Pesach.

Like Mother Teresa on a message grid, Nicola Sturgeon loves nothing more than going among the poor and downtrodden with a hug, some hope, and an embargoed press release. EU nationals are the latest beneficiaries of the First Minister's ministrations. The SNP leader has penned an open letter to EU citizens resident north of the border as part of her ‘Stay in Scotland’ scheme to help them secure settled status. The language is as meticulously neutral as it always is in taxpayer-funded Scottish Government initiatives: ‘As EU citizens in the UK you have had to endure years of careless indecision on what the future holds for your lives, your careers and your families...