SO far there have been no photographs of the Prime Minister on his 2022 summer holiday. Is it a holiday, a second honeymoon, a one-last-hurrah-before-Pickfords-arrives jaunt?

One of his predecessors, Margaret Thatcher, famously took to holidays like a cat to the 200m backstroke. Her office learned that if she was not to cut a break short – she once lasted four days out of a planned 10 on Corsica – they would have to pack her diary with meetings.

Even then she does not seem to have been able to switch off entirely. There is a photograph of the then Prime Minister and her husband, Denis, sitting on a beach in Cornwall in August, 1981. She is wearing a pale-coloured dress, flat but formal leather shoes, and pearl earrings. No Wilsonesque shorts for her, or tastefully crumpled linen like the Camerons or Tuscan Tony.

Judging by her summer Twitter feeds, Nicola Sturgeon “does” holidays about as well as Mrs Thatcher. With the First Minister there is generally a relatively quiet period on social media after the Scottish Parliament goes into recess, with deputy First Minister John Swinney filling in. But then the restlessness begins to show, and the tweeting restarts.

This summer, with the proximity of a Conservative leadership election, there has been too much temptation to bear, particularly when the contenders seem to be going out of their way to provoke. Both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have indulged in what sports fans call “trash-talking”, or what the rest of us call “a wind-up”, and Scotland’s First Minister has been out to give as good as she gets.

Trash-talking, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “insulting or boastful speech intended to demoralize, intimidate, or humiliate” is as old as politics itself. While it has traditionally happened at Prime Minister’s Questions and its Holyrood equivalent, most trash-talking today takes place on Twitter.

Liz Truss was not on Twitter when she called the First Minister an attention-seeker best ignored, but the row soon moved to social media.

Ms Sturgeon responded with a picture of a “cute” seal in Argyll, popping its silky smooth head out of the water. “I think s/he might be a bit of an attention seeker,” said the FM of the seal (which BBC Radio Scotland’s Off the Ball later likened, with uncanny accuracy, to John Swinney).

 

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By the end of the week it was Rishi Sunak who was trash-talking loudest by saying it would be “dangerously complacent” to ignore the First Minister and what he called her party’s “existential threat to our cherished Union”. Or as the front page of Saturday’s Daily Express put it: “Rishi: I’ll stop Sturgeon in her tracks.”

 

 

The trash talk gauntlet thrown, Ms Sturgeon tweeted a link to the Express splash with the comment: “Wondering how many opposition leaders/wannabes I’ve now heard this from.”

It’s a good question for a silly season pub quiz. Since becoming party leader then First Minister in 2014, she has seen a fair number of opposition leaders come and go. Helpfully, the Isla, Jura and Colonsay branch of the SNP posted photographs of them, accompanied, for true nostalgics, with the gallery tune from Vision On. How many can you name? Answers at the end (not counting Labour’s various caretaker leaders)*.

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That there have been so many in eight years speaks to the volatility of politics in this period.

The tally might yet grow, depending on how a Truss premiership, if that is where we are heading, plays out. On Saturday, Andrew Neil held few hopes for its longevity. The left in her own party, and what he called the “left blob”, would see to that, he wrote in the Mail. “There is a chance it will all unravel before winter is out and the Tories would be back in yet another leadership contest, which will stretch voters’ patience to breaking point.”

One might wonder what the relative quietude in Scotland during the Sturgeon era says about Scotland. While there has been churn in opposition leaders, and no shortage of controversies surrounding the Scottish Government, it is the goings on within the SNP itself that has generated most of the drama.

Meanwhile, as of today, there are still four more weeks to go until the new Conservative leader and UK Prime Minister is named. The trash-talking has barely begun.

*Johann Lamont; Ed Miliband; Jim Murphy; David Cameron; Nick Clegg; Tim Farron; Vince Cable; Kezia Dugdale; Theresa May; Ruth Davidson; Jo Swinson; Jeremy Corbyn; Jackson Carlaw; Richard Leonard; Willie Rennie; and finally Boris Johnson.