Sour Alba

Labour’s Lindsay Roy has won the Glenrothers by-election, beating the SNP by more than 6,700. The Nats had been widely expected to win the seat despite the fact that it was once safe Labour territory and is next door to Gordon Brown’s constituency.

The result is important for two reasons:

• It makes it more likely that Gordon Brown will lead Labour into the next UK General Election. While a challenge has been unlikely since the arrival of the credit crunch, a defeat in his kailyard would have weakened him within the party.
• It makes an independent Scotland less likely - as the result marks a serious brake on the momentum of the Scottish National Party. 

What a close shave we’ve all had. It turns out that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country, not a continent. She could have been a heartbeat from the presidency of the most powerful country in the world at a time when its president had a very dodgy heart.

Fox News knew this but in the spirit of right-wing journalism didn’t tell anyone until after the election was safely over.

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.

Very funny wee film about cars at a zebra crossing being faced with a seemingly never-ending parade of pedestrians in fancy dress.

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.