Sour Alba

Lord Foulkes has demonstrated how out of touch politicians are with public feeling by attacking BBC journalists for criticising MPs’ expenses. Sure, there are newsreaders who get paid more than most of us think they should. But they are not clearly on the fiddle, unlike some of George’s former colleagues in the Lower House.

It’s 18 months since I left scotsman.com. I knew the new Johnston Press redesign was, to put it very, very, mildly, unworthy to lick the boots of the 2001-2007 model.

I also knew that traffic would tank. I warned Tim Bowlder, the JP chief executive, of this face to face saying the JP redesign would lose “millions of page views and hundreds of thousands of users”. My warning was ignored and a JP apparatchik later explained that I had not understood how good their plans were.

Well, we can finally see how good their plans were. Audited traffic figures for scotsman.com have finally escaped into the light of day. According to ABCe, the site I edited for seven years now gets about 2 million unique users a month.

The stunning events in Glasgow East show that Scottish Labour needs to hurry up and choose its new leader so the new incumbent can be hounded out in the wake of the party’s shaming defeat.

Apparently Gordon Brown thinks he’s Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. The similarities are obvious : Byronic anti-hero driven wild by untamed passion and uncharismatic, prudence-obsessed bureaucat with a penchant for dropping his jaw open like a broken glove box.

Of course, he doesn’t say he is really like Heathcliff. No, even when it comes to literary characters Brown dithers. “Maybe an older Heathcliff, a wiser Heathcliff.”

An older, wiser Heathcliff. Wiser? Has Brown actually read the book? It is precisely because he lacks wisdom that Heathcliff is Heathcliff. A wiser Heathcliff makes as much sense as a more metrosexual James Bond, a more trustworthy Iago or a more laconic Stephen Dedalus.

But maybe Brown is truly like Heathcliff in one way. Perhaps we have misjudged him. Perhaps he is enacting a dark vengeance , the culmination of years of savage plotting after being spurned. Sadly for Labour, it was the party itself that spurned him by keeping out of the top job for so long. Now, he is exacting his revenge, wrecking its chances utterly.

I don’t know who’s tapping at the window but, sadly for Britain, David Cameron is hammering on the door. Given that Picture Of Dorian Thatcher scenario, you can’t blame Brown for retreating into fiction.

My second podcast. Longer than the first, now with added gratuitous and unsubstantiated claims of bestiality. Maybe.

 

 Sour Alba podcast 2: Scottish politics and donkey sex [5:13m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Wenday Alexander has resigned as leader of Scottish Labour. This is the right decision not because of any donation nonsense but because she’s an uncharismatic policy wonk.Very bright and all that but she doesn’t have ingredient X.

Labour now need to find a leader with brains *and* people skills, someone who can match Salmond and Sturgeon on the intellectual and rhetorical level.

Sadly for Labour, there’s no-one matching that description on their benches…

Mad propz (as teh young peeple say) to my old mucker Simon Pia who has landed a plum job as chief spinmeister to Wendy Alexander. He is only her third media spokesman in six months so the impressively begubbed one has been positively restrained of late.

The key fact about Simon is that he is a devoted follower of the poet-warriors in green and white who grace this earth under the name Hibernian Football Club. Quite how his experience of this once great Scottish institution brought to the brink of extinction by desperately poor leadership will relate to the Scottish Labour Party I have no idea.