AT last, what we’d all been waiting for – Nicola Sturgeon’s oral evidence to the committee investigating her government’s handling of harassment complaints. An eight-hour session digging into what went wrong and allowing her the chance, at long last, to provide a detailed rebuttal of Alex Salmond’s claim of a “malicious plot” against him.
The session followed a week of fevered and at times hysterical commentary from irresponsible politicians and click-chasing journalists, who sought to suggest that various aspects of what they framed as a Salmond vs Sturgeon psychodrama called into question the very foundations on which Scottish democracy rests. One-party state! Banana Republic! Tinpot dictatorship! How much easier it is to throw around wild claims than it is to explain the tedious minutiae of how a new HR policy was created in the wake of #MeToo and how its implementation was botched, resulting in a costly legal defeat.