I’m sure you’re just as gripped as I am by the ongoing Conservative leadership contest.
The battle to become our next Prime Minister is top of everybody’s agenda.
That is, when we’re not combing through our direct debits to see what can be cancelled, gasping in horror at our latest gas bills and swearing loudly at the fact that a 500g block of cheese now costs roughly the same as a small flat in Dunfermline.
If you have tuned in, hoping to find out what Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss intend to do to ease the cost of living crisis if they are crowned prime minister, you’ll have been left disappointed.
There’s no plan, beyond telling people to stop watching Netflix and eating avocados.
Their message to people across the UK who are worried about their bills has been: tough luck.
There will be no “handouts’’ (of tax-payers money) and no emergency budget either.
Instead, we’ve been treated to the usual petty nonsense that Boris Johnson made fashionable within his petty, nonsense, party.
Liz Truss is the posing pot to Nicola Sturgeon’s kettle
Last week, Liz Truss earned herself wild applause at a leadership hustings with party members when she branded First Minister Nicola Sturgeon an “attention seeker’’ and said the best thing to do was ignore her.
Look, politicians aren’t exactly wallflowers. Especially ones that reach the top, as Nicola Sturgeon has and as Liz Truss looks likely to do.
But Truss’s statement has more than a faint whiff of hypocrisy about it.
Nicola Sturgeon is “an attention-seeker” says the notoriously publicity-shy politician Liz Truss. pic.twitter.com/B9oTRBlTsm
— Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) August 1, 2022
For starters, she’s the odds-on favourite to replace Boris Johnson: a man who doesn’t merely seek attention, but hungrily hunts it down, like those lads who work in IT but spend their weekends up a mountain in search of Big Foot.
In comparison to Boris Johnson, Nicola Sturgeon is a Where’s Wally politician, blending into the background, not so easily spotted.
And then there’s Liz Truss herself.
There’s a saying – I don’t know who said it, probably an old man with a beard – that you criticise in others what you most dislike about yourself.
And even before she was aiming for the top job, Liz Truss was a bit of an attention seeker.
I’d advise you to take a few hours and trawl through the – frankly bizarre – series of photoshoots that she has participated in.
Her interest in Scotland and the stability of the Union doesn’t go beyond refusing a second independence referendum”
She’s posed for more elaborately-styled portraits than the Queen.
Which is fine: whatever floats your boat Liz, but if you’re the black pot you can’t go around throwing jabs at the kettle.
So much for that ‘Union of equals’
Nicola Sturgeon saw the funny side of the furore surrounding the Liz Truss comment and posted a photo of a seal that she had spotted while visiting Argyll, tweeting that it was ‘’a bit of an attention-seeker’’ complete with winking emoji.
No doubt that winking emoji is currently being discussed at the highest levels of Conservative Party HQ, as proof that the First Minister is too cheerful a figure to govern Scotland.
Silly spats and personal jibes between politicians are nothing new and Nicola Sturgeon is not shy of deploying them herself from time to time.
But this stooshie has given us a glimpse into the approach that will be taken by the woman who is likely to be our next Prime Minister.
Her interest in Scotland and the stability of the Union doesn’t go beyond refusing a second independence referendum.
Spotted this cute seal in beautiful Argyll. I think s/he might be a bit of an attention seeker 🦭😉 pic.twitter.com/MwJUpgUteu
— Nicola Sturgeon (@NicolaSturgeon) August 5, 2022
Whatever you think of Nicola Sturgeon and her party: she is the democratically elected leader of a devolved nation.
In 2014, we were told the UK was a Union of equals.
We were told Scotland should “lead the UK, not leave the UK’.’
It’ hasn’t quite worked out that way, has it?
If the most meaningful engagement we can expect between the next Prime Minister and Scotland’s First Minister is such arrogant dismissal then we’re in for a bumpy road ahead.
Will Liz Truss be the fourth PM Nicola Sturgeon sees off?
Liz Truss is an Unionist and the preservation of the increasingly fractured UK should be something she takes seriously if she becomes Prime Minister.
Right now, she’s trying to woo an electorate of middle-class, Home Counties Conservative members.
But the next electorate she will face will be voters across the UK in a general election.
Her party’s pitch to Scotland has to consist of more than “We don’t like Nicola Sturgeon’’.
Conservative party members might agree with that statement.
But the First Minister has won every election she has fought since she became SNP party leader. So clearly that sentiment is not widely shared among people in Scotland.
If Liz Truss refuses to work constructively with Nicola Sturgeon she will show more clearly than any Yes campaign leaflet that the UK is not, in fact, a Union of equals.
Liz Truss looks likely to win the leadership contest when the result is announced in September.
That will make her the fourth UK Prime Minister that Nicola Sturgeon has seen in her time in office.
If the next Prime Minister treats her with as much disdain as the others have, their party might come to regret that decision sooner rather than later.
Conversation