How dare Alex Samond behave as he wishes, such freedoms are for the specials! And why should that offend anyone? Well, of course, it will offend those whose every decision is driven by their sense of superiority and entitlement. We Indy supports, for the most part, don’t want to be better than everyone else, we just want to be the same as everyone else. Basically, rules are for the little people, not the special people like themselves. It manifests most frequently as hypocrisy and a genuine belief in ‘one rule for us, another for them’. (I’m sure the EU27 currently see the UK in this light !) They believe and behave as if their UK is something special on this planet of nations. It sometimes seems everyone related to WM, its Establishment, its media, and the Union which defines it, suffer to some degree from this sense of entitlement. It starts from feeling elite and entitled, moving through institutional exceptionalism, to a collective narcissistic personality disorder! There’s a spectrum of groups with self importance behaviour. We have no idea how much Salmond’s production company is being paid to make The Alex Salmond Show, but we suspect that it’s a somewhat less profitable endeavour than Kezia Dugdale’s jungle adventure.Īnd we’re also pretty sure that raising women’s rights, LGBT rights and the situation in Catalonia is a more honourable pursuit than eating kangaroo’s genitals for laughs and money, even if Dugdale occasionally manages to squeeze in a bit of politics chat with some mouth-breathing bubblewit from TOWIE or Made In Chelsea between waterfall showers and Bush Tucker Trials.īut the sheer temerity of Alex Salmond in yet again refusing to lie down and die when indignant Unionist hacks wanted him to will never be forgiven as long as he lives, and is the frame through which all Scottish political journalism should always be viewed. So you’d expect Alex Massie to be pretty hopping mad about it, right?īut all he can manage is a weary, vaguely disapproving “good luck to her”. (She’ll be donating her salary to charity while on the show, but that doesn’t help people who need the services of their member of parliament, and the financial sacrifice will be outweighed many times over by the fee Dugdale will be paid for appearing, of which she’s pledged only “a portion” to good causes.) She’s chosen, though, to take three weeks off from that job in order to appear on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, during which time the people of Lothian can presumably go and get stuffed. Despite resigning as Scottish Labour branch office leader, she remains a list MSP for the Lothian region, and is paid over £61,000 a year by the taxpayer to represent the people of that area. Kezia Dugdale, unlike Alex Salmond, still has a day job in politics. But when it came to another former Scottish party leader, he was for some reason in a rather more forgiving mood. Massie used some slightly more measured language when it came to writing about the show in the Spectator, merely describing Salmond as an “idiot”, a “fool”, a “chump”, “pitiful”, “embarrassing” and “disgraceful”.
(BBC Scotland, we should perhaps note at this point, does not currently carry a single dedicated political TV show from a Scottish perspective at all and hasn’t done for more than a year.) The first episode of The Alex Salmond Show featured guests from both Labour and the Tories, opened with lengthy discussion and advocation of women’s and LGBT rights, followed by a 15-minute interview with deposed Catalan president Carles Puigdemont – something which has proven beyond the capabilities of mainstream UK news outlets despite the remarkable events currently engulfing an EU member state.
This is Spectator columnist Alex Massie reacting earlier this week to the news of Alex Salmond doing a show for Russian news channel RT.Īlex Salmond is these days a private individual with no responsibilities to anyone, and RT is a legal, Ofcom-licenced UK broadcaster whose output is beamed free into every home in the land.