Hamish Gobson’s diary: the view from across the Uisge
Monday 20 November 2023
HUMZA YOUSAF calling Suella Braverman “unfit for public office” seems to me to be a clear case of the pot calling the kettle white. Last Monday’s Herald reported our whiter-than-white First Minister, who thinks it wrong for Scotland to have so many “white” people in senior positions in public life, considers that no wrong was done when his Minister for Net Zero Moroccans, Michael Matheson, ran up a staggering data bill on his iPad—as a result of his family watching football, apparently—while on holiday in that fascinating country.
Now the ex-Community Occupational Therapist (as his website describes him) is requiring community political therapy to save his pointless career.
His chief therapist seems to be our humane and well-travelled First Minister. Due to his generous approval of wild surfing on the internet, he is now known on Great Todday as Humza YouSurf.
YouSurf had already said Matheson’s misuse of public funds—now repaid, I should emphasise, apparently confirming they were wrongly taken in the first place—was a “legitimate parliamentary expense”. He has clarified that statement by saying also that he gives his “100% backing” to the Matheson fella, presumably intending to imply that it is OK to misappropriate public funds. ‘That is what we are all here for,’ he might have added in jest – a mode in which many a true word is said to be spoken.
If Suella Braverman is “unfit for public office”, where does that leave Morocco Matheson?
He claimed his iPad was used for constituency business, so what sort of security breaches are we going to see when his sons speculate about the money they could make from blackmailing their rather glaickit father by selling their stories to ThinkScotland for onward transmission to the fraud squad?
Certainly, Matheson’s track record suggests it is he, not Ms Braverman, who is unfit for public office. His qualifications are impressive. While Minister of Justice from 2014-2018, he was accused by both Labour and Tories of having “acted unlawfully” over many issues, perhaps the most lasting one being the concealment of the disaster that the merger of all Scotland’s police forces into the national gendarmerie caused. In effect, Matheson was complicit in the plan which has enabled politicians for the first time in British history to control policing for the benefit of the government. (For details of that point see The Justice Factory, pp. 400-404)
After that, until a few months ago, Matheson was Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Connectivity, a portfolio which has since been rebranded as Net Zero, Energy and Transport. The common factor is transport.
Is he the genius responsible for the pothole epidemic on Scotland’s roads, or did he let his sons do that? Or is he the homicide-in-power cad who refused to dual the A9 properly, despite saying he wanted to reduce deaths on Scottish roads to nil? Or is he the smug Central Belter who watched football on an iPad while letting the Great Todday ferry service sink from beyond being useless to the seabed?
Morocco Matheson was also involved in the claim Scotland had 25 per cent of somewhere’s wind-generating potential. It turns out that was another lie, though there is no evidence that Matheson spotted it until his sons went online and found out Scotland has wind in proportion to his size and location, not in proportion to the vanity, stupidity and uselessness of the Minister for Wind.
A streak of political nastiness came out when, in 2020, this windbag blocked the Union Connectivity Review, presumably because it was announced by an English Prime Minister. By doing so, Matheson the Mighty prevented Transport Scotland from engaging in discussions that might have made for more convenient cross-border travel. As Christine Graham might have said: “Whit a maaaan!”
Now Matheson is Minister for Surgeons, Matrons and Midwives – which, I venture to predict, will be equally disastrous in its outcome. But one thing seems to be clear from his past performance: we will not know what he is really up to until Alister Jack hoists up his plus-fours and gets out of his luxury marquee in order to shine the spotlight of central government auditing control on the activities of the entire Scottish misgoverning class.
One final point: Matheson has been one of the cheerleaders for financial incontinence in Scottish politics since at least 19 June 1999. That was when he said “damn the cost” in a debate about the Holyrood Project extravaganza. “My concern,” he told parliament, “is not so much about the materials or cost of the building, but that we ensure we have a Parliament that is open and accessible to all members of our society.”
The context and detail is given in a recently published book about Scottish politics in these years (p. 146). No wonder the member for Falkirk West wants to prevent open access to his iPad.
So why does YouSurf still have confidence in this sleekit spiv? I consulted the seaweed and the answer was clear. The fronds told me that YouSurf wants to have a Cabinet of nitwits, numpties, nincompoops, no-hopers and low-energy non-achievers so that he can pretend to be normal when sighted against a backdrop of his “Cabinet of curiosities”.
Since the readership of ThinkScotland is literate – i.e. prefers books to expensive “football” on the Moroccan internet – I would like to put all this in a wider context, that of the British constitution. An excellent book about it has recently been updated (to 2023) and re-issued by Oxford University Press in its useful “Very Short Introduction to” series, which I have mentioned before.
These books are clearly written, well-produced, authoritative and short. Better still, they are cheap. For the cost of Matheson’s week with his iPad, you could have bought 1,200 copies of this title for Scottish schools.
The main subject of the book is Britain’s famous “unwritten constitution”. An important sub-theme is the fact that, as Walter Bagehot noted a century and a half ago, it depends on “a common, though implicit, code of conduct.” (p. 34). However, Professor Loughlin says that since the 1990s, “it has become almost impossible to write about the British constitution without explicitly advocating the need for reform.” (p. 37)
So what happened in the 1990s? Two things stand out for me in this context: Tony Blair became Prime Minister and Mr Matheson went to Holyrood. Now we have progressed from “dodgy dossiers” to “dodgy surfing”. The laird of Falkirk West would rather watch an iPad than spend time with Moroccans. One would not, after all, want to be seen fraternising with the natives. How very Net Zero of him!
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Hamish Gobson lives on the Hebridean isle of Great Todday (Todaidh Mór) and features in Nicola Sturgeon: the Years of Ascent (1970-2007) – A Citizen’s Biography of a Driven Woman in a Drifting Parliament (Ian Mitchell, 2022) – available on Amazon and also reviewed here by Tom Gallagher.
Also written by Ian Mitchell is The Justice Factory (second edition): Can the Rule of Law Survive in Twenty-First Century Scotland? which considers the future of liberal democracy, taking Scotland as an example.
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Photo of Moroccan national football team in their striped away kit, courtesy of the Matheson Digital Photo Library
(Picture by Werner100359 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73413634)
