Controversy over plans to sing lyrics mocking former leader Charles Kennedy's drinking problem did little to dampen enthusiasm for outrage at the annual Lib Dem end of conference Glee club.
At one point from the stage an activist joked: "A hands on approach- that's known as the Chris Rennard method". Yes, that is the former party chief executive who last year faced accusations of sexual harassment.
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Nicola Sturgeon spoke at a lunch organised by the Scottish Parliamentary Journalists' Association, some members of which have described her in print as "the most dangerous woman in Britain".
She arrived after delivering a powerful speech on human rights alongside Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty. "It's a good thing I didn't bring her with me," she joked. "You'd have had the two most dangerous women in Britain with you."
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BROWSING the fringe programme for Tory conference, Unspun’s eye was caught by an ad for the Taxpayers’ Alliance Question Time event, featuring party luminaries such as Ruth Davidson, Ken Clarke, Jacob Rees-Mogg and, er, former Labour minister Tom Harris. The ex-MP for Glasgow South turned public affairs consultant was always a Blairite ultra, but, really, supping with the Tories?!
“It’s because I know the organiser,” he tells Unspun. “Besides, they wanted to balance the panel and put in someone a bit more right-wing.”
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Nick Clegg told the Lib Dem conference this week that his party, devastated at the general election, would be the "comeback kids" of politics.
Now where have we heart that line before? It was recycled from Danny Alexander, who used it in the run-up to said general election, when he also predicted his party would see off a surge in support for the SNP and gain seats UK-wide.
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FORMER Scottish Secretary Alistair Carmichael paid a low-key visit to his LibDem brethren at Holyrood this week. The group thought it would be fun to surprise SNP staffers and MSPs on a walkabout, as Carmichael is the Nats’ Great Satan - leaker of the infamous Frenchgate memo about Nicola Sturgeon. So was he chased from parliament with torches and pitchforks? “Nah,” laughs our LibDem source. “When they’re on a keyboard, the SNP are pretty hard. But up close they’re absolute wimps.”
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THE SNP is currently ranking its Holyrood list candidates, leading to a scramble for the top places from scores of applicants. Polishing his credentials, Central Scotland MSP Richard Lyle referred to his work with the council umbrella group the “Confederation of Scottish Local Authorities”, or Cosla. However it’s Convention not Confederation. A simple slip, perhaps, but then again, Mr Lyle also boasts of having been a councillor for 36 years.
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PUBLICATION of the annual Holyrood expenses produced a shock winner in the form of the SNP’s Colin Weir. It emerged that at the end of March the Edinburgh West MSP spent £4194 of public dosh on a heavy-duty Risograph printer able to spew out 150 copies per minute - apparently the dearest piece of kit ever claimed by an MSP on office allowances. Alas for the tooled-up Mr Keir, he was deselected as an SNP candidate a few days later. All those annual reports he presumably planned to send voters next year now lie, like his printer, in the dust.
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