Everybody's Plans for Christmas 2015

Hey there, online stalkers!  Fancy a sneaky glimpse into the seasonal activities of the “so-called” great and good?  They don’t just disappear because we stop giving a tinker’s cuss about them for 24 hours, you know.

So, with thanks to Mr Capaldi for the loan of his Tardis, let’s zip across the timeline and see what everybody’s planning to get up to once they’ve finished unwrapping Santa’s goodies…

Alistair Carmichael MP (oh, how that appellation grates) will take delivery of 365 pairs of flame-retardant underpants, which should last him a whole year as long as he only speaks once a day.  Needless to say, he’ll add the cost to his legal fees claim, itemised as “briefs”.

Kezia Dugdale will spend the day gazing at the Forth Road Bridge, wearing her disappointed face.

Derek McKay MSP, the SNP’s Mr Fixit, will travel throughout the land on Cloud Nine, mending potholes, fixing faulty boilers, replacing slates on storm-damaged roofs and, most importantly, arranging some bloody interview training for his SNP colleagues.

Gary Robertson, whose pre-Christmas Good Morning Scotland conversation with Derek is destined to be an online classic, will spend the day spitting rivets.  In an ironic twist, the folk working on the Forth Road Bridge will find these extremely helpful.  Merry Christmas, Gary!

David Torrance will publish a new unauthorised biographical work, Derek McKay: My Part In His Downfall, written in the space of 20 minutes and based on Wikipedia, a couple of random Tweets and the advice of a gypsy crone. The Waterstones price of “we’ll give you 50p to take the damn thing away” will ensure a few sales, albeit mostly in households where one table leg is shorter than the other three.

Donald Trump will launch his personal brand of eau de cologne, Trump Mist, produced by bottling his farts.  He’ll then order a drone strike on Trumpton for image rights theft and disassociate himself from Nellie the Elephant on the grounds that she’s a “stoopid broad”.  Finally, as his approval ratings soar higher than Jackie Bird’s left eyebrow, he’ll hurl insults at the crew of the International Space Station because he’s run out of targets on Earth.

John Swinney will find a 5p piece in his Christmas pudding and miraculously use it to dual the A9, put fairy lights on the Queensferry Crossing and get started on an oil fund.

Jackie Baillie will swallow the 5p and claim that by not spending it on any of the Swinney items she somehow has 10p, which can be used to offset George Osborne’s non-existent tax credit clawbacks, end world hunger, fund a mission to Mars and still leave enough to buy five magic beans.

Willie Rennie will call for an enquiry after he breaks his tooth on the 5p in his Christmas pudding, his greetin’ face turns all the satsumas sour and the joke in his cracker turns out to be a final demand for £800,000 from Police Scotland.

Tricia Marwick, Holyrood’s Presiding Officer, will delightedly unwrap a brand new light-sabre sent by the makers of Star Wars, who have witnessed her numpty-skewering powers with awe and want to offer her a part in the next movie as a galactic referee.

James Kelly MSP will consolidate his reputation as the worst player of Musical Chairs in the history of the human race.  His excuse of being unable to sit down because he can’t find his arse with both hands will, as usual, fail to impress the panel of 6-year-old judges.

David Cameron’s present of a boar’s head sporran will be the talk of Chipping Norton.

Eleanor Bradford, BBC Scotland’s medical misery correspondent, will discreetly insert a shedload of laxatives into Christmas dinner at Glasgow’s Super-Duper-Hospital.

Jeremy Corbyn will ruin the whole occasion no matter what he does.  If he doesn’t issue a festive message he’ll be cancelling Christmas, and if he does he’ll be behaving like flaming Royalty.  If he puts on a Santa outfit he’ll be brazenly wearing the Red Flag and offering something for nothing, and if he doesn’t he’ll be a humourless wonk who enjoys crushing little children’s dreams.  If he protests to IPSO he’ll be a gutless coward, and if they find in his favour the Sun will print a retraction so tiny that bacteria can trample it underfoot.

Blairite conspirators in the Parliamentary Labour Party will exchange anti-Corbyn messages hidden in mince pies and look forward to the day when they can knife Jeremy in the front, back, side and soles of his feet, before relaunching Labour as the acronym Tony always intended it to be:  Loosely Assembled Bunch Of Unprincipled Ratbags.

Iain Duncan Smith will feel an eerie chill gnawing at the fabric of his being.  But don’t worry, he’ll just throw another benefits claimant on the fire.

Iain Gray MSP will gaze at the array of dog biscuits on the shelves of his local Morrison’s, wondering if they do them in Golden Retriever flavour.

Alex Salmond, bored with simply walking across Strichen Lake, will turn it into wine and serve it to his Christmas Day guests.  The Herald, egged on by the Scotch Whisky Association, will concoct a slavering SNPBad headline accusing him of breaching European free trade regulations.

Lawson Carjack MSP, the Scottish Tories’ answer to Anton du Beke, will promote the lost art of dancing by inviting Ruth Davidson to join him in a seasonal military two-step.  Unfortunately, in a fit of over-enthusiasm about the “military” part, she’ll turn up in a tank and accidentally flatten him.  He’ll be rushed to Glasgow’s Super-Duper Hospital, where the “Bradford special” Christmas dinner will give him a massive case of diahorrea. This, despite his injuries, will keep him dancing all night long.

Nicola Sturgeon will spend the day kicking ass.  Hey, it’s what she does – why should Christmas be any different?

Bullshit 1, Justice 0

Although the future is unknowable, I can offer Whining Willie Rennie at least one guarantee: he and his morally vacuous mince-cluster of Lib Dems will be given a comprehensive seeing-to at the 2016 Holyrood elections.  That apart, it remains to be seen exactly what the fallout from today’s “he’s a lying scumbag, but that’s actually legal, so shut it, Nats” Carmichael court decision will be.  But what the heck, let’s give it a go.

As BBC Cringeland marks the outcome with its traditional parade of whey-faced Unionist chortlers, and the rest of us are left resisting the temptation to go out and uproot lamp-posts with our teeth, the immediate priority is clear.  We must support the Orkney Four, monstered at the start of proceedings as vexatious politically motivated agitators, and now facing the prospect of the same tedious spittle-gauntlet again.  As if Carmichael’s smear, and his subsequent lie, weren’t “politically motivated”, and the “political” nature of that lie wasn’t the essence of his beetroot-faced defence!

More pressingly, stupendous as the Four’s crowd-funding total may look, if Carmichael is awarded costs they still stand to lose everything, including in one case the ability to pursue a career.  That justice is denied to ordinary folk by being so far out of their price range that it’s visible only to the Hubble telescope is a disgrace, and a reminder that after independence the hard work will just be starting.  For now, whatever it takes, even the equivalent of two Wings crowd-funders in one outrageous go, we simply can’t allow the Four to go under.

Moral victories may be as much fun as a rub-down with caustic soda, but the quartet really do need to be commended for having the initiative to bring this case, and the fortitude, staying power and downright cojones to see it through.  As sages such as Lallands Peat Worrier always warned, the legal task they faced was equivalent to attempting the world pole vault record using a garden rake.

In the event, they established, officially and on the record, that Carmichael lied.  They forced him to display, for all the world to see, what a mediocre, evasive, self-serving scrote he is.  That the world will doubtless turn a blind eye simply illustrates how pin-headed that world can be, and that they failed only to prove that lying was an offence under the Representation of the People Act just shows that the law couldn’t be more of an ass if it were offering rides on Millport Beach.

If this were fitba’, it would be like leading 2-0 after playing the other team off the park for 89 minutes, only to have both goals chalked off and a last-minute penalty awarded against you because of an arcane FIFA rule about half-time pies being insufficiently hot.  It may not be an Establishment fix, but it’s a brain-contorting legal travesty.

Justice may yet be served by a Parliamentary Standards enquiry, in the sense that my nine-year-old niece may one day be the first woman on Mars.  But it shouldn’t even come to that.  If Carmichael were a sensitive human being instead of a self-important fart cushion, he’d unobtrusively take the Chiltern Hundreds and bog off to Patagonia for five years’ rehabilitation as a goat-herder. 

No such luck.  As long as he doesn’t make the mistake of standing in another election, he’s all set to hop back aboard that well-known choo-choo, gravy-guzzling pail in hand and smug how-jammy-am-I-mammy grin on his face.  Could there be a nice furry cloak in his future, even though sane people wouldn’t even recommend him for membership of the Tufty Club?  In a world where Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown, the Laurel and Hardy of the indyref campaign, slide effortlessly into sinecures in the high-powered financial shafting sector, and wee Dougie Alexander becomes Bono’s personal sanctimony adviser, surely anything is possible.

In the meantime, any chance of a teaspoonful of contrition from Carmichael amongst the Desmond-style inundation of self-exculpatory guff?  Nope, thanks for asking, folks, but hard luck.

“I’ve been vindicated,” orates the puffball, when the word he should have used is “vindictive”.  “It was all a plot by the Nationalists,” he asserts, as if he’s on the shortlist for an Iain Duncan Smith Victim-Blaming Mendacity Award. “Scottish politics since the referendum has been so polarised,” he whines, when he’s the one who made a pole arise, somewhat forcefully, up the back passage of democracy.

But, hey, what do you expect now that smearing and lying has been enshrined in law as acceptable behaviour?  Enjoy the temporary gloat, Unionist scoffers who made a meal out of our “grumpiness” this morning.  One day very soon, one of these bastards will be doing the same to you.

If you'd like to donate to the Orkney Four fund-raiser, you can access it here.