Author Archives: stephenjdaisley

Seldom has a public servant’s stock risen so sharply only to collapse so quickly. For several weeks, Dr Catherine Calderwood was the public face of the Scottish Government’s response to Covid-19. In television ads urging us to ‘stay at home’, her beefy Belfast-by-way-of-Cambridge tones reassured a nervous populace with cool expertise. Scotland’s chief medical officer […]

Her resignation came eventually, late last night, but until then Dr Catherine Calderwood had intended to continue in post. On Sunday, as she arrived for the daily briefing on coronavirus, there was one question on everyone’s lips: Is there a doctor in the house, and which house is she in?  This was no routine check-up. […]

Coronavirus is showing the best and worst of British business. We have all heard the stories: some firms are being responsible and decent while others are treating the deadly pandemic as business-as-usual or even a chance to lay off workers at short notice. I doubt I’m the only one who won’t be forgetting which firms […]

It is an iron law of Scottish politics: never write off Alex Salmond. The former First Minister’s acquittal by a jury on a series of sexual assault charges brings to an end what he described as a ‘nightmare’. The political fallout, however, is still to come. Joanna Cherry, a senior Nationalist at Westminster, said: ‘It […]

It’s been ten days since I left the house. I developed a dry cough while visiting my parents and have been self-isolating in my teenage bedroom, surrounded by hand sanitiser and Backstreet Boys posters. I waited for the other dread symptoms to follow — fever, shallow breathing, loss of taste and smell — but so […]

History turns as much by chance as by design. For every meticulously planned revolution, there is the daring shot that triggers a world war. The coronavirus pandemic is more than a medical emergency; it is a contagion that will spread to every cell and tissue of our lives. The way we live is going to […]

One of the biggest dangers for a political party is to get too fond of talking to itself. That might not be a problem for the SNP, since so many of them are barely on speaking terms these days. Scotland’s ruling party is having an ugly, public falling out over ‘gender identity’, of all things. […]

‘This week, the coronavirus spread to Scotland,’ Jackson Carlaw intoned. ‘The First Minister can be assured that the Scottish Government will have the full and engaged support of myself and all Scottish Conservatives.’ Gah. It was going to be one of those question times. You know the kind, where everyone falls over themselves trying to […]

The period between rising star and yesterday’s man is growing shorter and shorter. We already know that Ruth Davidson will be standing down at next year’s Holyrood election after ten years as an MSP. A decade is a long time in most careers but in politics it is barely a warm-up; after ten years in […]

It must take its toll, all that phoney outrage, and, true enough, Nicola Sturgeon looked fed up being fed up. At First Minister’s Questions, she did her usual shouting and deployed her familiar demagoguery but her heart wasn’t in it. Not long before FMQs kicked off, one of her most promising MSPs, Highlander Gail Ross, […]