Search results for Scotland:

Humza Yousaf finally did everyone a favour and decided to resign as Scottish First Minister and two notable things stand out: 1) His long list of achievements is actually just a single item of "not being arrested like the last one" and 2) The only people lamenting him stepping down are those on the unionist side of the aisle who will be forever grateful for him personally killing the independence movement for a generation or two. I'm not sure what he's planning to do next although his brother is ......

It's 4 years since the fire at Notre Dame. The police still don't know who started it although they have a hunch

Arnold Schwarzenegger posted a video of him filling in potholes. That's fairly physically demanding work at his age, I imagine that afterwards he said "Ahh...me back!"

There's also been more revelations about the SNP and the seized Campervan. This was the £100k motorhome seized from Peter Murrell's mother, the SNP claim they purchased it to use as a battle bus and that she was just looking after it for a bit. It's pretty much the same as that running joke in Father Ted where he repeatedly claims that stolen money was just resting in his account. Typically when I think of Scottish people with criminal records it would be Sheena Easton or maybe Lulu with that Eurovision song. But now it turns out that the auditors have quit, they can't get their accounts signed off and there's a fairly solid chance the party won't be able to claim any short money funding from Westminster next year. All while Humza Yousaf watches on, a good indication of how useless he is would be that he was almost certainly aware what was going on with the money and still thought he'd like to be leader of the party when it all went south, supposedly tens of thousands of party members have quite in the last couple weeks and Alex Salmond is probably laughing harder than the time he got to go back stage and meet Billy Connely.

The next domino to fall for the SNP is likely to be the transgender woke policies and for a sign of things to come it's worth looking to America. This week the brewer Anheuser-Busch lost $6bn after a consumer backlash against a new marketing campaign that saw cans of Bud Lite feature Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender activist. This is a blue collar beer, popular at BBQs and Football games, being fronted by a young man who spent the last 2 years identifying as a girl and making tic-tok videos about it. The only possible cultural similarity is that Bud Lite is dishwater that self-identifies as a premium lager. The company saw beer sales collapse after a consumer boycott combined by people not wanting to be seen with rainbow-branded cans that they them a participant, willing or otherwise, in that culture war. A lot of people just want a beer, not politics. In response the company put out a statement about how the marketing manager who imposed the campaign just wanted the company to be inclusive. The truth is that they likely just did it for bragging rights amongst their liberal social circle with no comprehension of how wildly unpopular the campaign would be with normal people. Which brings things just about full circle with the SNP.

The band S-Club 7 are going to be named S-Club 6 after the death of band-member. As a double whammy for fans, the ticket prices for the upcoming reunion are going to have to go up due to it being 14% less rubbish.

Garry Lineker is saying that Alan Hansen left Match of the Day because of the nerves. Yeah Garry, you getting on them

But let's talk about the main story this week. Older viewers might remember that episode of Porridge where Fletcher writes a cleverly worded letter to his missus, and the police end up wasting their time digging the garden up for nothing. Well it seems that Ronnie Barker must have been married to Nicola Sturgeon because this week showed the police show up at the Casa Del Sturgeon to arrest her husband Peter Murrell. Peter was the SNP’s chief executive and is alleged to have misappropriated or lost half a million pounds that had been set aside for a future referendum. The implication is either that he pocketed it, or that it got spent without him noticing how or when. If it's the latter then that just means that he's utterly incompetent at his job and given the SNPs track record at this sort of thing, I think we now all know what happened. If he has half a million quid in his bank account then I'm a vegan.

The main reaction to the arrest has been the demand that the SNPs leadership election should be rerun now that people know that a Humza Yousaf claim to be a continuity Sturgeon candidate might not be a good thing after all. Plus that election was that classic result 52-48% and that means they need to rerun the election indefinitely. People should be careful asking for change though, I recently asked Alexa to change the TV and 2 hours later a delivery driver showed up to swap it for a 60" OLED display. There's also the angle that if Humza temporarily steps down then all the backbenchers get to roll the dice again at getting themselves a cushy cabinet job although there are other job openings out there this week. I have a friend who's a careers advisor and a kid recently came in and said he wants a temporary position where he gets paid a ton of money for achieving nothing. His interview as interim manager of Chelsea is this coming Wednesday.

Shamima Begum lost her latest court challenge to regain a British passport. Some of defenders have gone to far as to say she contemplated suicide, to which the rest pointed out that we knew that, because she showed everyone the vest and explosives on a youtube video 5 years ago

Roald Dahl was in the news after the publishing company played the oldest scam in the book by cancelling his original books, waiting for tens of thousands of existing books to fly off the shelf, before reversing their decision. It would be a tragedy if words like stupid or dwarf are going to be banned, because I was looking forward to buying a biography on John Bercow

Joe Biden paid a surprise visit to Ukraine. Although given his ongoing cognitive decline, everything comes as a surprise to him these days.

Ed Sheeran has released a hot sauce. Just be glad it's that and he's not released a new song.

For now the race for head of the SNP continues and this week saw 3 runners and riders:

Kate Forbes is the current finance minister although she's been attacked by many of Nicola's friends, a lot, for being religious and opposing the worst machinations of the transgender movement. But the policy that they really dislike is her desire to have a major reshuffle after she wins which would see lots of people lose their cushy £100k salary and expense accounts.

The favourite to get the job is Humza Yousaf who is also notable in being a great example of SNP hypocrisy at play. Forbes is attacked for being a Christian but Yousaf is a Muslim so he has so far being given a free pass when it comes to these same issues. He skipped out on the debate and vote on gay marriage because the Mosque told him not to support it.

But to spice up the entertainment, there's also Ash Regan whose main policy seams to be that she'd just declare Scottish independence, without even bothering with a referendum. Just like me self-declaring to be the King of Mars or any of these candidates declaring that they'll win the next election. The idea of not holding a public vote on the issue is an almost childishly naive idea one if it weren't vaguely dangerous. It certainly doesn't have any detail about what would happen if a chunk of the country simply refused to go along with it and Union flags remained flying in Inverness, Shetland declaring itself part of Norway, asking London to intervene and refusing to ship fuel south of Perth. On the other hand, perhaps the idea of not holding a vote is just a reflection that the SNP are finally maturing and finally realising that they're flogging a dead horse and voters will never vote for it. If we've learnt anything in the last 10 years it's that politicians holding a binding referendum to rubber stamp something generally works about as well as trying to baptise a cat. I'm not sure where Kate Forbes stands on animal baptisms.

Is it a bird is it a plane, is it a UFO or a Chinese spy balloon? Nope, it turns out it was a $100 project by the local Bottlecaps Balloon Brigade. The $100 balloons were shot down by Sidewinder Missiles that cost $400k apiece. and thus we can probably assume that the missile won't be the only one getting fired. Closer to home I here the MOD has developed a new missile called the civil servant, that doesn't work and can't be fired.

Talking about new vehicles, there's been the collapse of the electric vehicle firm BritishVolt with questions being asked about what went wrong. If you ask me it was probably how instead of getting in someone like James Dyson or Alan Sugar, the firm was headed up by former cricketer Ian "Beefy" Botham who with the best will in the world knows more about engineering a century at Edgbaston than car batteries. In other car news JaguarLandRover have released a new electric vehicle which I think should be called the Range Over

Concerns that Bruce Willis might be racist after he was overheard saying that he didn't recognise his own street any more.

But of course the big story this week was Nicola Sturgeon finally being forced to resign, although even today there's already talk on social media about demanding a 2nd resignation if this one doesn't work out. It is quite an achievement though that through her widespread incompetency across multiple government departments and scandals, she perhaps has done more than anyone to eradicate the possibility of the Scottish electorate voting for an independent SNP-led Scotland. Nonetheless her preferred pronouns are now was/were, and let's hope this lady is not for returning and that this is yet another nail in the coffin for the global trend towards wokery, that surely next sees Justin Trudeau kicked out of office. Given the tendencies of left wing politicians to embrace this garbage, I'm genuinely surprised hasn't let to Labour Mayor Andy Burnham trying to rename his city Themchester. Or possibly force supporters to sing songs in support of Themchester United. The Labour back benches have been remarkably silent on the downfall of sturgeon and her ridiculous campaign to enshrine it as a human right for a rapist to spent his prison sentence at a woman's prison. I did hear that Diane Abbott was described as non-binary, but then they explained it was because she's unable to count beyond 2.

The police arrested 15 people outside an asylum seeker's hostel after a protest turned violent. In a twist of irony, those protestors will now be getting a roof over their head, 3 meals per day and legal representation all courtesy of the British taxpayer

There's a few studies out showing that vaping leads to lowered testosterone in men, apparently one of the first symptoms is the desire to take up vaping.

A crime boss from Brentford was arrested in Thailand after spending 5 years on the run. The article mentions that he only had one leg so presumably a better expression would be on the hop.

Burt Burt Bacharach passed away and apparently at the time he was writing a charity single for the Turkish earthquake, "Rooftops keep falling on my head" It would have been going up a song by a corrupt local building inspector "Walk on by"

I read that cows kill more people that sharks. That came as a surprise to me, I wasn't aware that cows killed *any* sharks

Garry Glitter was released from prison after serving 8 years for his horrendous crimes. I was glad to see that even multinational companies like Unilever are changing up their packaging try to keep him on the straight and narrow this time with everything from washing powder to packs of bin bags carrying a warning message "keep away from young children"

More mystery balloons over Northwestern America. All we know right now is that they're not German because then they'd be red and there would be 99 of them

This week I thought we’d look at Scotland, or more specifically the way the place has been managed by the SNP which for decades were an opposition party with one policy, until following the referendum and subsequent election they walked into the sort of majority and absolute control you would normally only see in a country near the equator with nicer weather. Nicola Sturgeon and her supporters though have since embraced the idea of Scotland being a one-party state although those have famously not been especially good governments from which to copy ideas with the one exception of perhaps ancient Egypt which lasted a few thousand years before being brought down by a pyramid scheme. Since then the party has had a go at all sorts of things including running schools or buying a railway, all of it shambolic. It sort of reminds me of how the Chuckle Brothers would turn up each week trying a different job from the one before, hoping things would work out better for them this time. And as always things would turn south but the BBC would keep letting them have a go rather than criticise them.

First of all, let’s look at the economy. On paper, the Scottish Government had a deficit of more than 22% last year, compared to around 15% for the UK as a whole which is shocking. When it comes to 3 letter acronyms that really puts the SNP up there with BHS and AOL when it comes to running a business badly. Perhaps a better one would be the bank RBS which for a while had a balance sheet larger then the entire Scottish economy before it turned out that asking Fred Goodwin to run a bank was a bit like asking Ian Blackford to lose 3 stone. When I was kid, they would casually throw around ideas about reopening the coal mines or how oil would pay for everything but then they decided that net-zero was a vote winner so that’s out the door. Presumably the strategy is to join the EU and be given money as part of a grand plan for Brussels to embarrass England. Although nobody has a clue what currency an independent Scotland would use and the EU have all but confirmed they wouldn’t be allowed in, simply on the basis of Spain and Italy vetoing them, fearful of encouraging their own nationalist movements.

Let’s look at specific examples though. The SNP’s first go at nationalization was when they took ownership of Prestwick Airport in 2013. After buying the failing airport for £1, Edinburgh then paid the airport directors bonuses of £200k and spent over £40m to keep it as a “going concern” In the mean time any money it has earned was largely as a result of President Trump who took up the offer of a military refuelling station although I’m not sure how Nicola and her peacenik friends feel about using taxpayers money to bankroll Donald Trump and his ability to more easily send aircraft to the Middle East, let alone ferry people to a new golf course.
In 2019 there was the announcement that the Scottish Government would take over the Ferguson dock yard in Port Glasgow, rather than see it go bankrupt. And to do so they’d buy two new ferries. Neither have been completed, though the costs have skyrocketd to £250m and arguments have broken out about both senior management pay, as well as who even officially signed off on the contract. Due to failures in the design process, the ferries have windows painted onto the side, rather than actual windows and that about sums up how well things are going but as they say in management, if at first you don’t succeed, redefine success.

What’s another name for long term investment? A: A failed short term investment! So moving on this year saw another go at business as the Scotrail Franchise was brought into public ownership. Everyone on the left knows that changing the ownership and redesigning a website or logo is all you need to fix long term structural issues, especially with that most hallowed of industries, the railways. And so shortly afterwards, no silver bullet was found, and an emergency timetable was imposed on all services that weren’t themselves canceled. It reminds me of that one about the hot air ballooning business that never took off.

Change of topic, The Census. This is a pretty difficult one to mess up. Every 10 years you get a very accurate headcount and you can use it to plan public services. The turnout is normally 97 or 98%. Except the SNP decided that it obstinately do its one at a different time from England, blaming covid, but largely so that they could re-engineer sections of it. This included sections about race and gender that were left blank by vast swathes of a confused public as well as the requirement to use a computer, which immediately left it inaccessible to many of the elderly but also the disabled and those without a decent internet connection – not something that rural Scotland is best known for. There is a £1000 fine if you don’t hand it in although given that 1 in 10 of the population haven’t I frankly question the ability for the courts to even process that many cases, or the government to collect the money efficiently. Although it would go some way to paying for the cost of the debacle, so far £148m in a country that only has 5½m people the last time a (British run) census was undertaken.

There are numerous other angles we could attack from here, there’s the Minimum Alcohol pricing policy which did exactly as its opponents said and drove poor people to buy less food rather than go teetotal. There’s a drugs policy that saw just shy of 1300 drug-related deaths in 2021 which was the 2nd highest ever number. That award goes to 2020 which had been the highest number since records began. There’s educational decline with a focus on promoting wokery and tinkering here and there though with the exception of history which I think is the only subject the SNP really cares strongly about, because it clearly isn’t economics or critical thinking. Nearly a decade ago a new curriculum was launched and Nicola Sturgeon went on record, “Let me be clear – I want to be judged on this” although those targets were recently abandoned.
You really get the impression that nobody cares about any of this stuff because they didn’t join the SNP to run a school or get involved in social work. It’s always been about getting another referendum and another after that until they can get a yes vote and finally move onto better paid jobs in Europe or lecturing in America or maybe ambassador to somewhere. The ethics and moral compass have all been very clearly on display the last few years. There was the court case against Alex Salmond where he was finally acquitted although only after it became clear that members of the SNP had personally tried to influence the judiciary. Just weeks before the trial, Derek Mackay, Sturgeon’s finance minister, was forced to resign after sending a series of inappropriate texts to a 16yo boy. Finance scandals abound with a serious of corruption and embezzlement allegations regarding what happened to money earmarked for a 2nd referendum. That was going to be a big news story but events overtook it with yet more seedy behaviour. Ian Blackford, is the SNPs head person at Westminster and when he wasn’t wearing a suit that looks like it was made out of carpet tiles, he spent years telling people that the SNP had a zero tolerance approach to the sort of things the tories did. But then he decided to express political solidarity for Patrick Grady, the former whip who was shown to have been sexually harassing a party staffer

All of this is what underpins a nationalistic message that Scotland would be better run independently by the SNP on the clearly farcical idea that Scottish, especially SNP, politicians are innately better and more moral than those from England. Especially a posh English person like David Cameron - whose father was actually from Aberdeenshire. The rule by England policy is more ridiculous because before then you essentially had 2 decades of Scottish rule with half of the Labour cabinets for years being from Scotland including both prime ministers. There’s a reason why it was called the British Empire and not the English Empire.

But so finally we get to the unknown question about whether or not there will be a 2nd referendum or whether simply declining it will cause nationalist unrest and further the SNPs cause with expressions like “thwarting the will of the people” carrying more emotive weight that “once in a lifetime” Curiously, in 2017 Boris Johnson was still foreign secretary and he stood by the Spanish government’s decision to “uphold the constitution” that included deploying the Guardia Civil to prevent people in Catalonia from voting. I wonder what ever happened to him…

This week: Kate Middleton paid tributes to murdered woman Sarah Everard, palace officials were keen to stress that the event was not a rehearsal. Elsewhere rumours abound that Elton John is working on a new version of candle in the wind

Also, a bizarre series of photos were published of Shamima Begum wearing western style clothes as her supporters again try to make the case for her returning to Britain when in reality she’s about as welcome as Julian Assange with a USB US memory stick

But the main story this week was from Scotland where with 6 weeks to go until crucial elections a parliamentary committee concluded that Nicola Sturgeon has been telling lies as big as the ones when the Royal Bank of Scotland told investors “what could possibly go wrong”. I have a friend who was recently phones by the local school and told that his son had been telling lies and he responded by saying “Tell him, he's pretty good. I don't have any kids” In contrast, in 6th year I was voted Most Likely to Lie About Past Accomplishments. It’s true... or is it…

The result of the enquiry is not really a surprise to anyone, least not Nicola Sturgeon who says that the verdict was decided weeks beforehand. This is in stark contrast to the Alex Salmond case where the result was also decided weeks beforehand except then Alex had at least paid for a good lawyer to make sure he was acquitted. The Alex Salmon case and the waste of public resources was a damning indictment and really shows why it’s important to have a separate and non-politicised judicial system. It’s also one of only a handful of similar examples though. In Westminster the SNPs chief Whip Patrick Grady was forced to resign and it ultimately turned out that accusations had been swept under the carpet for years. Elsewhere there are a number of growing scandals including a contract for new ferries that I'm guessing must be managed by Francis Ford Coppola in so much as it's £97m over budget and 4 years late; also Prestwick Airport’s dubious dealings with the US military. There’s also another financial scandal where the Lochaber aluminium smelter was given government guarantees over energy prices, before the owners decided to backtrack on building a new smelter and instead use the government backed line of cash to renegotiate its borrowing terms and pocket the money. None of this is anywhere as well reported as it should be, and every one of them should be a resignation matter on their own, and yet for someone who claims to dislike Thatcher, Nicola Sturgeon does seem to claim to want to 'go on and on’ though Margaret Thatcher was forced to resign not long after that quote. For now, Nicola continues to blame Westminster and the English Press for his accomplices mismanagement, taking out court injunctions in courts presided over by Sturgeon supporters and SNP apparatchiks which have about as much jurisdiction in England as they do over Narnia. If Nicola ever does get her way and talk of a hard border with England comes up again, her wall will have a lot more in common with the Berlin Wall than Donald Trumps one, albeit Trump will still only have a golf course to the north of it and Berlin will probably pay for it again, much to the annoyance of most people, though to the surprise of no-one.

In the news this week
- Shamima Begum learnt that she’s definitely going to be unable to return to Britain after her court appeal process turned all ironic and blew up in her face
- Captain Tom was finally laid to rest although in bizzarely cruel turn of events, the casket was carried in a German-built Mercedes-Benz followed by a BMW.
- Harry and Meghan did two major TV appearances, being interviewed by Oprah and James Corden, leading many to demand that Harry & Meghan should change their attention-seeking ways and start respecting Harry & Meghan’s demands for privacy.

There was also a fairly big story in Los Angeles where Tiger woods was involved in a car accident. We've all seen him make a 300 yard drive except this was the first time that the drive in question was down the side an embankment. Talk about landing in the rough. It at least answers the question of "Why did Tiger Woods buy a new car?" "To make a hole in one" Supposedly the sheriff who oversaw the accident investigation confirmed he wasn't drunk after making him do a field sobriety test where Tiger was asked to count from 1 to 1000 counting in 50s which was probably pretty easy if he was counting out $50 bills as he was doing it.

But of course the other big story of the week was from Scotland where Alex Salmond was giving evidence at a hearing at Holyrood as to whether Nicola Sturgeon deliberately mislead parliament. I say “hearing” but there's a salmon and a sturgeon so perhaps this one is pronounced “herring”
What are the two competing sides of this story though:

1. Mr Salmond claims that there was an ongoing campaign led by the government to damage his reputation and potentially throw him in jail despite his innocence. He says that the prosecution service threw vast public resources at a fabricated court case when then there was no real evidence against him. The SNP led government supposedly forced it to do so, against legal advice but backed by perjury and lies and an easily coerced civil service allowing it all to happen. There is institutional bias and corruption at the top level and SNP apparently stands for Subterfuge ‘n’ Perjury
2. Nicola Sturgeon on the other hand claims it’s all a bizarre conspiracy theory with no evidence to back any of it up and that after they fell apart Alex decided to drag her reputation into the mud and force her to resign.

The key thing is though that Alex Salmond has no evidence to present because he’s currently under a court order to not share the evidence he has, supposedly damning texts and the very communications proving that Nicola Sturgeon (allegedly) used the law and coerced the prosecution service to throw him under the bus. I say bus but if it’s Edinburgh I should say throw him under the tram. We are currently now living in a world where Alex Salmond of all people claims that the Scottish institutions cannot be trusted to run an independent country, and that’s coming from a man who’s spent his decades long career fighting for that very one thing. It’s akin to if Carolyn Lucas had done a lap around the Top Gear track or if Jamie Oliver was doing an advert for McDonalds, although given what happened to his business empire stranger things have happened after all, the only dough he has these days is that sourdour starter sitting in the cupboard above the spice rack.

With regards to the Salmond case though the one question I’ve not quite gotten to the bottom of is “why?” The SNP were fearful that they were going to lose seats because of the court case and their wrongly placed expectation that he would go to jail. It’s why they sided with allowing Boris Johnson to call that election in 2019, damage limitation at the ballot box. That’s the election that decimated Labour, gave Boris a thumping majority and ultimately led to Brexit being able to happen. If some of what Salmond says is true then Nicola Sturgeon gambled her reputation, allowing Brexit to happen, got her husband to allegedly commit perjury and possibly risked the public turning on the very idea of Scottish Independence itself. All for what? Because her and Alex disagreed about things? There’s clearly something else being hidden from public view here and unfortunately we have no clue what it is, unless there are secret clues as to what it is just south of Edinburgh at Rosslyn Abbey and that Dan Brown therefore writes a story about it. And it gets turned into a film with an action scene where Tom Hanks ends up in a car chase at Donald Trump's golf resort and there's cameo where Tiger Woods looks at the speeding car and then camera and shakes his head in disapproval.

The big story of the week was supposed to be Theresa May’s Conservative Party Conference speech which, let’s say “didn’t go according to plan” unless that plan was “let’s make a pilot for a political comedy show in the style of Frank Spencer” There was a coughing fit, a prankster, the sign behind her literally fell apart and by the end I was looking around the stage to see if anyone had put a bucket of wallpaper paste at the top of a strategically placed ladder.

On the other hand, it’s been a busy week elsewhere: there was the massacre in Las Vegas followed by the ongoing political situation in Catalonia, which (depending on who you speak to) is either “a constitutional disaster” or “a damn good distraction from events at home!” Personally I’m just looking forward to when Spain vetoes Catelonia from being allowed into the EU and Brussels is forced to decide whether it wants to A) side with the Catelans and therefore support the implicit concept of nationalism or B) support Madrid but in the process let the world see that Catalonia didn’t crumble without the benevolent overreach of Brussels.

As someone from Scotland though it’s pretty incredible seeing how things are playing out in Barcelona. I suppose a Scottish equivalent would have been for David Cameron to have sent the the army into Glasgow 2 years ago with Union Jacks flying, and of course hope that Celtic fans didn’t mistake it for an overzealous troop of Rangers fans. The British army has some of the best troops in the world but I’d question their chances against 500 east-end football fans who’ve spent all lunchtime getting lager’d up and singing support for the IRA. Certainly on the topic of football I do find it amazing that Nicola Sturgeon is so keen to support Catalan independence, it’s hard enough for Scotland to qualify for a major tournament these days without there essentially being a 2nd Spanish team to contend with.

It’s going to happen though, it’s more a question of how long it will take, what the rest of Europe will do to suppress similar secessionist movements and of course how Texas will react. It required someone like Abraham Lincoln to hold the US together last time anyone left the union, but Donald Trump turning out in the end to be remembered as a unifying figure, a new Lincoln or George Washington? It seems about as likely as Theresa May doing something really brilliantly well, whether it be winning an election or just giving a well delivered popular speech.

So it's the morning after the night before and we got a shock result. Theresa May thought it would be a rubber stamping exercise, like getting your passport renewed except it was more like one of those awful bank applications where you have to supply 2 utility bills and then you're declined because due to a typo

Hats off to Jeremy Corbyn though, he didn't actually win a majority but he sure as heck managed to defeat the Blairites in the Labour party and that might mean we've finally seen the last of Tony Blair, until he eventually ends up on trial at the Hague. Corbyn got the youth vote out against the odds and especially in spite of Dianne Abbott who spent the last 6 weeks making Corbyn and Abbott look more like Abbott and Costello. Noticeably, Labour's uptick in the last few days directly coincided with her putting an end to her endless series of car crash tv appearances. I saw a programme the other night and I wasn't sure whether it was an interview with her or a documentary about Ayrton Senna.

The Lib Dems having lost most of their target new voters to Labour are pretty much exactly where they started but with Vince Cable back, the political equivalent of firing up that old computer in the spare room and upgrading it from Windows 95 to Windows 98. In Scotland, the SNP also got bumped back to reality with Angus Robertson and the big fish himself Alex Salmon losing their supposedly safe seats.

UKIP and the Greens as usual got hundreds of thousands of votes but next to nothing to show for it, yet more proof that we need proportional representation: it's about the one thing that Caroline Lucas and her greens actually agree with Paul Nuttall on asides from not shaving. We'd probably have proportional representation already were it not for Nick Clegg backing it a few years ago, fulfilling his roll as Harbinger of political disaster.

And so that just leaves us with the madness of a minority administration in Downing Street. I'm posting this on Friday morning and four questions remain that I suppose may be answered by the time you're watching this. 1) Will Theresa Resign? 2) What happens with Brexit now? 3) Will Boris finally make a proper grab for the leadership? 4) Will anyone ever be able to afford a holiday abroad now that the pound is falling faster than the odds of a 2nd election in the next 12 months.

We’re halfway through the election campaign so I thought we’d take a look at what the various parties stand for, seeing as how we’ve not had have Ed Milliband chiseling anything onto a demented novelty gravestone this year.

The Conservatives are frankly miles in the lead following Theresa May’s media strategy of keeping Boris and all other the Gaffe prone MPs away from a microphone. She’s also promising to deliver on Brexit in order to finally put and end to Nick Clegg who increasingly resembles one of those Japanese soldiers that were still up in the mountains decades after the war had ended.

Labour wants to pile money into schools and hospitals but the biggest spending commitment is probably the suggestion of bringing both the post office and the railways back into public ownership, although that might actually be doable seeing as how Corbyn winning would trigger the mother of all stock market crashes and all those Royal Mail shares would then be very cheap for the government to buy, and I doubt Corbyn could do worse than Southern Rail

The Green Party manifesto is mostly made up of all the things that Jeremy Corbyn thought were a bit too left wing for Labour but say what you will I suppose the Greens do have an honest view on where they stand with regards to Europe. It seems a bit inconsistent though, seeing as all the European stuff people enjoy like sports cars, chorizo and cheap flights to Spain are the same things the green party wants to ban.

Also in the pro-EU court are the Liberal Democrats who don’t like Theresa May’s decision to trigger Article 50 and think that the public should keep getting a say in it at every opportunity until they get it right. Not to be outdone, the SNP also want a second Brexit referendum and a second Independence referendum too. Both of them also promise more money for schools, presumably because with all that extra voting, local primary schools will need to spend money upgrading their parking facilities.

That just leaves UKIP who want to make sure the Conservatives don’t go soft on Brussels. And for those like me in a boring safe seat looking to waste your vote, the Monster Raving Looney Party have quite a good manifesto this year; they think that the UK should exit Europe but go further and join the Duchy of Cornwall to benefit from tax exemptions.

So it’s 5 week to go until the next general election after Theresa May decided take everyone by surprise, very much like a school teacher posting a surprise test on the first day back. If it was a surprise maths test, it really wouldn’t be looking good for a lot of people in the Labour Party although the they do know a lot about “Division” and Dianne Abbott knows about “pi” and, oh dear, Ken Livingston just read the word “Axis” and he’s off on another rant about the war…

Back to the election, it’s likely to be a scene of unmitigated disaster in some constituencies. For a good metaphor, look at those very same Labour constituencies on a Friday night when Weatherspoons closes. The kebab shop represents Labour’s manifesto, in so much as nobody knows what’s in it. That the bloke peeing into a phone box represents most people’s reaction to the establishment. The guy not being let into a nightclub is Tim Farron because neither the bouncer nor the electorate recognise him. The girl getting undressed in a back alley is actually not part of the metaphor, she’s just someone that Boris Johnson bumped into when he was up north campaigning.

Long story short though, we can all look forward to June the 8th as election day, unless you’re the SNP in which case the replay is scheduled for August, November and possibly next January if they can get the high court to back their demands for a rerun.

Donald Trump built an election strategy on a platform on nationalism and how the country to the south is some sort of dangerous failed state and it seems like it’s a policy idea that Nicola Sturgeon is keen to emulate. Thus we have the proposal of yet another referendum on Scottish Independence. Apparently when people say “no”, they mean “yes” although that seems like a part of the Donald Trump, Bill Clinton repertoire she might want to clarify as being strictly about politics.

Cards on the table, I was in favour of Scottish Independence last time around but sorry, if it now means adopting the Euro and passing control of everything over to Brussels then, like many Scots, I’ll say screw that for a game of soldiers. If I wanted to see what being a small country run by the EU is like, I’d move to Greece; at least they’ve got cracking weather and cheap wine.

The reaction of the financial markets to the shock news though: absolutely nothing because, at least for the next 5-10 years, Scottish Independence is in that basket of “things that won’t happen”, alongside Jeremy Corbyn becoming prime minister, Heathrow getting a 3rd runway, a coherent budget without U-Turns, or the Lib Dems having a view on last year’s Brexit vote that is either Liberal or Democratic.

Oh, one last thing, it’s Cheltenham this week so a top racing tip to readers, that would be Lunch Hour, 12/1.