Monthly Archives: April 2011

Published in Press and Journal: 11/04/2011

POOR SamCam. The prime minister’s other half was hoping to sneak off for a few days’ R&R in the Malaga sun with her fella to celebrate her big four-oh.

Some guttersnipe called Beckett Fish spotted them lolloping in the Stansted departures area looking fed up waiting for their cheapy-cheapy, cheap-cheap Ryanair flight. He had his iPhone and . . . click, click, click.

It’s so wrong. Our premier should be showing a bit more decorum. Poor dears. Could they not afford something a bit more classy? The answer is not no.

Save your sympathy. Worth a cool £30million and a former media PR supremo, Dave pulled off a superlative bit of staged fakery. Many clues were there to be sniffed out by a twisted and cynical person. Like me, you say? Whatever.

Ryanair flights are always jam-packed. Where were the other passengers? Why was no one sat near them? Where were the papers the PM must always have to hand when he travels? And the minders? Gruamach means glum in Gaelic and they were very gruamach.

That’s because SamCam and DavCam were mere actors in a well-rehearsed piece of theatre.

Those piccies of a bedraggled pair of passengers saving the pennies went round the world. The Camerons knew that Beckett, or some other fish, would take the bait.

Gruamach and Gruamacher

It worked brilliantly. Showing themselves not to be extravagant or insensitive to the plight of ordinary people, they were tightening their fur-lined crocodile-skin belts, with the antique brass buckles, like the rest of us. They shared the pain.

Good on them, said the country. If they make an effort, so must we. Cancel the caviar; just five courses tonight.

The Camerons played a blinder. They’ll be remembered as being suitably gruamach until the election. A vote-winner.

Not that we have not had a stroke of vote-harvesting genius in Scotland this week with the launch of the parties’ manifestos. No, I don’t mean Scottish Labour’s promise to “abolish the failed Scottish Labour”. Although that was fairly interesting, too.

It was Alex Salmond’s SNP which pulled off a cracker. OK, his daft promise to keep rotten old schools open and prevent kiddies from enjoying the advantages of education in well-kitted-out larger schools was rubbish.

His fly move, though, may win him the election in May. He promised everyone in Scotland superfast broadband if the SNP gets in. It’ll cost £50million, but “no one will be left behind”. What a masterstroke.

Forget your boring cheap ferry travel or a new Mallaig-Lochboisdale ferry. Salmond may as well have said he would give £1,000 and a big wet kiss to every single person in return for an X on the ballot paper. Actually, forget that bit about the immense moist snog. Did I dream that? Shouldn’t have had that late cheese and pickle sandwich last night.

Faster broadband is something people here really need. They’ve heard rumours that, in far-off places, like on the mainland, people have lightning-fast speeds for low cost while theirs chugs along with all the zooming rapidity of an ancient, arthritic hippopotamus.

Like Cameron, Salmond was being sensitive to what ordinary people want to hear.

For instance, some people want a palaver over the royal wedding. Should we really take a holiday to celebrate the coming together of a couple of privileged toffs with good teeth whose excruciating dullness is shovelled under our noses daily? Not for me, ta.

Thankfully, this not being Korea, we have the freedom to say we don’t approve of such garish trashiness.

Local authorities up and down the country are properly exercising their right to save their cash and not give unearned holidays to staff. Workers can still take it out of their entitlement if they want to be sad and wave union flags at parties in their honour – or, more likely, at the telly.

Despite our fondness for boogying on down, hardly anyone in Scotland wants a cringeworthy 1950s-style street party. In this information age, it goes against the grain to toady to anyone – especially unelected aristocrats. Most people will go to the pub, where they can hurl ghastly insults at Kate and her dress as the newlyweds glide past the cameras looking down their noses at their subjects-in-waiting.

Sectarianism is completely unacceptable, except in our Free Churches, of course, so the great unwashed have to direct their venom at something. And they are it.

What did hard-up Western Isles Council decide? Councillors here have gone all sycophantic and decided, despite the impression given by their current and scandalously-unreported efforts to slash hard-pressed home carers’ mileage allowances, oceans of spare cash are sloshing about in the coffers.

So it’s granting a paid holiday on the 29th to anybody and everybody – provided they work for the council.

Party on, dudes, they said. It’ll put a smile on the faces of the wretched workers. They need cheering up, they said. Well, when you see their faces, we can’t argue with that.

Not a single application for a street party, but the public sector can trot off to the boozer with the rest of the plebs – and be paid for it.

A poker-faced municipal mandarin was asked how not just thousands but tens of thousands of pounds could be justified. He blathered on that it was a fillip to the economy because the Queen and her husband take holidays here.

No she doesn’t, pen-pusher. Her Maj’s vacations are afloat on an English-owned boat and she takes picnics, bought in Harrods, London SW1, to scoff in distant places like Sandray and Little Bernera, where grubby oiks won’t see her scoffing her Scotch eggs.

The official also said it would be good for morale if council staff could join in the merriment for Wills and Kate.

Knowing how that lot can put it away, they’ll be merry all right.

Still, it’s on a Friday, so they’ll have the whole weekend to recover.