Say what you like about the Scottish National party, you can’t deny they know how to enjoy themselves. There were no semi-comatose cabinet ministers dressed as Stepford Husbands as there had been at the Tory manifesto, or stiff-jawed shadow ministers pretending they weren’t really there as at Labour’s. This was a full-on rally. Yellow SNP T-shirts were out in force and everyone was wearing SNP wristbands. Even the gents’ toilets had been decked out for the occasion. Above the urinals was a picture of the green benches of Westminster decked out in tartan. It’s what every SNP delegate dreams of while he’s having a piss.
“Hello Perth,” said the SNP’s Pete Wishart, apparently under the delusion he was headlining the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury.
The choice of both the Perth Concert Hall and Wishart was no accident. The launch was to have been held in Edinburgh the previous Tuesday but was postponed because of the Manchester bombing. With a week to reflect, the SNP had switched venues. Wishart’s Perth seat is one of those under threat from the Tories. A chance to shore up the local vote was not to be passed up.
Not that Braveheart Pete wanted anyone to think he was feeling the pressure. “The Tories tried to take my seat last time,” he said, playing to the crowd. “And I doubled my majority.” One felt he did protest too much. He was dragged off before he got a chance to shout “you don’t want my trousers to fall down now, do ya?” and replaced by Angus Robertson, who assumed the role of genial afternoon gameshow host. A bit of light bantz before the star attraction.
As the lights brightened and loud AOR drowned out the auditorium, Nicola Sturgeon walked on looking entirely relaxed. This was her stage and these were her people. She got a standing ovation without saying a word. After milking the applause for slightly longer than was decent, Nicola got down to business.
It had come to her attention that she quite liked having 54 MPs in Westminster and even if she didn’t get quite as many this time it would still be an awful shame if all that talent was to go to waste. So what she proposed was this. Although the SNP would obviously represent Scotland in practical terms, she wanted everyone in the UK – yes, you in Totnes even – to look on her party’s MPs as their guardian angels. People to watch over you when Labour weren’t. Standing up for Scotland was also standing up for the entire United Kingdom. The SNP would be the only nationalist party to have the interests of several nations at heart.
This wasn’t the most orthodox of sells, but like its leader the SNP members have learned to think on their feet and they greeted their role as the newly appointed policemen of the country they’d spent most of their lives trying not to belong to with rapture. Even more quick thinking was soon required as, after dismissing Labour as an irrelevant spent force, Nicola then proceeded to outline a manifesto that sounded as if it had been lifted from the one Jeremy Corbyn had published a couple of weeks earlier. Even the Labour leader might have struggled with that dialect. The only difference was that Nicola didn’t even bother to cost her manifesto. No need, really.
There was a brief lull as Nicola outlined a few policies that were never going to happen, and a few heads did go down at this point. But then she got to the crucial bit. When she’d previously said that she wanted a second independence referendum before the spring of 2019, she hadn’t quite absorbed the fact that most Scots didn’t appear to be in the mood for thinking about a second referendum right now.
So she wanted to be more flexible. She wasn’t saying no to a second referendum. Just that she’d like to be a little vaguer about her timings. The SNP would now only demand a second referendum when the time was right. And that time would be when Theresa May had messed up the Brexit negotiations so badly, every Scot would be begging for independence so they could remain in the EU. Then and only then.
After a quick flirty Q&A with the press, Nicola left the stage as another power ballad filled the hall. It had gone OK. Better than OK. Two people could play at being Supreme Leader. A fight to the death with the Pretender over who had the bigger mandate. When the time was right. Never forgetting that.
Outside the hall, the local Tory candidate was doing a little campaigning of his own. The wolves were circling around Braveheart Pete.
