What a difference a week makes. There was a completely different feel in the Holyrood chamber as the parties got down to the first weekly First Minister”s Questions knockabout since the election.
Nowhere was the change more noticeable than on the Labour benches, where leader Iain Gray was on fire.
His troops were beaming as he pressed home his party’s decisive election victory north of the border with a succession of neat one-liners and heavy blows.
It was the performance of a man unshackled, leading a party that for the first time since devolution is in opposition north and south of the border. And it showed.
He taunted the SNP for forecasting they would win 20 seats when they won six “Just like a baker’s dozen is 13 instead of 12, a Salmond score is six instead of 20.”
He then lulled Alex Salmond into boasting that the NHS budget in Scotland is up, before unveiling plans by Glasgow NHS to cut 1200 jobs this year, over half of them nurses and midwives.
These, he thundered, are not cuts from London, they are the health secretary’s cuts. “Nicola Sturgeon isn’t letting these cuts happen, she is demanding them of the health board,” he said.
Then he turned his fire on the new Tory-Lib Dem coalition government, the “ConDem parties” he branded them, planning £6 billion of cuts this year.
He had advice for the First Minister. “Yesterday Alex Salmond wrote to David Cameron telling him he doesn’t want cuts here,” he said.
“Can I suggest he uses his mighty hand to write to this own health secretary and tell her we don’t want her cuts in our hospitals?”
For his part, the First Minister feigned curiosity as to why Labour had decided to go into opposition instead of talking seriously to the Lib Dems and others including the SNP at Westminster. He had a theory about it.
“They want to spend the next five years absolving themselves of any responsibility for the economic crisis they visited on this country and the huge public spending cuts to come,” he said.
Scottish Tory leader Annabel Goldie tried to inject a bit of the new politics sweeping Westminster into the proceedings, inviting Mr Salmond to “work with the new politics and abandon his girn and his whinge.”‘Clegg bite’Perhaps, he said, if the new government had good news for Scotland, but not before he had reminded Ms Goldie of her remark about her boss’s new best friend, the deputy PM “A Clegg bite swells up, hurts for a few days and then goes back down.”
That’s a Clegg bite Ms Goldie will have for “some time to come” observed Mr Salmond. Nothing that “a little Tory anti-histamine can’t make a lot better,” she retorted.
This was never going to be an easy FMQs for Lib Dem leader Tavish Scott, whose party south of the border are now wedded to the Tories so emphatically rejected in Scotland.
His tactic was shrewd and he stuck to his script. He invited Mr Salmond to praise his party, in government for just over a day, for stopping children being held at the Dungavel immigration removal centre.
No one would disagree with that, but Mr Salmond wanted to know if the Lib Dems would honour a pre-election promise of £240 million of extra spending for the Scottish economy.
“Vince Cable, when I met him before the election campaign, assured me that would be the case,” he said a matter the Lib Dems “will not be able to dodge.”
For the time being, Mr Scott was happy talking about Dungavel, and dodging.