Your Voice Is a Locked Zoom and Only I Have the Key
Things go badly again for Douglas Ross during a Covid update.
Poor Douglas Ross. If it wasn’t for bad luck, he’d have no luck.
During last week’s Covid update, his questions to Nicola Sturgeon were drowned out by the clucking of a passing hen. (Don’t ask.) Yesterday, as he attempted to interrogate the First Minister on her latest pandemic statement, his Zoom session went awry again.
No chickens were harmed in the making of this call. Instead, in the middle of a fulsome peroration against vaccine passports, the Scottish Tory leader abruptly switched from his familiar Morayshire twang to a fitful, mechanical warble. One minute he was informing the First Minister that her plans for vaccine certification were ‘an absolute shambles’, the next he sounded like a Dalek midway through an ill-judged appearance on The Masked Singer.
An icon for Nationalist MSP Clare Adamson, which pulsated in the top-left corner of the screen during Ross’s question, might point to a rational explanation but I remain to be convinced. The Tory leader is an alien replicant. Change my mind.
‘First Minister, would you like Mr Ross to repeat the end of that question,’ Presiding Officer Alison Johnstone ventured.
‘No!’ came the SNP benches in unison.
‘If he was here, we could hear it,’ Sturgeon sassed, before accusing Ross and other opposition figures of ‘doing down Test and Protect’. They’ll have some way to go to do it down as much as the Scottish Government has.
Sturgeon’s update didn’t update us on much, running through signs encouraging and concerning, as well as the JCVI’s statement on triple-jabbing people with conditions that suppress their immune system. She also teed up today’s parliamentary vote on vaccine passports, which prompted a doozy of question from Tory Graham Simpson.
Simpson related to the chamber how, earlier that day, he had downloaded his vaccination passport and, ‘within a minute, I managed to create a copy of the certificate in which I was able to change every single detail’.
Crime is really getting out of control under the SNP. We’ve got Tory MSPs boasting about forging documents on the floor of the Scottish Parliament.
Simpson contended that his fake certificate showed a flaw in the system. Sturgeon explained that, yes, you could do that if you were so-minded, but what you couldn’t do is alter the QR code, the scannable element which contains the relevant data.
Then, with a wicked grin, she added: ‘I advise the member not to seek to travel on the forged document that he just admitted to having, because the QR code and his identity documents will probably find him out.’
Simpson probably shouldn’t expect a call up for the next Ocean’s Eleven movie.
Not that the First Minister is in any position to lord it over her hapless interrogators. Called upon to answer a question about Covid rates in Lanarkshire from one of her backbenchers, Stephanie Callaghan, she instead responded to a question about the recovery in Stirlingshire from another of her backbenchers, Evelyn Tweed.
This was a particularly impressive feat in that Tweed hadn’t yet asked her question. Sturgeon keeps complaining that she doesn’t have enough powers but once you’ve acquired the gift of telepathy gaining control over corporation tax doesn’t seem quite so impressive.
It was a right noisy affair yesterday, with MSPs heckling, gossiping and gabbing their way through questions and answers. Alison Johnstone gave them a thorough talking-to before bringing proceedings to a close.
After that dismal show, there was an economic debate on the Programme for Government, opening with speeches by Finance Secretary Kate Forbes and Tory finance spokeswoman Liz Smith. Each was, of course, shaded by the political prejudices of the woman delivering it but both were serious in tone, moderate in temperament and showed some rigour of thinking about the economic challenges ahead.
Then Ivan McKee suggested Scotland could have got through the pandemic without the economic backing of the UK Treasury. Smith was polite but withering. The former schoolmistress proffered the minister a look of such awestruck contempt that she may have been swithering between giving him an A for effort or a spell under the dunce’s cap.
Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on September 9, 2021.