I bet he says the same thing to all his new guests. The cheery manager of one of the last dirt cheap hotels in Manhattan had just led me up the long, steep steel stairway to his top floor. “Welcome to the Penthouse,” he said with a knowing smile.

His attic was a grid of streets of little plywood sheds, pre-industrial versions of the Japanese-style high-tech plastic sleeping pods mushrooming in some of the world’s most expensive cities.

This place had everything a low-rent newspaper hack like me could ever need. There is a shared shower room and toilet, wi-fi and a power-up socket and a quirky Scottish receptionist who served up cereal and coffee in the morning (as long as you whispered so you don’t wake anyone sleeping in the nearby huts).

I keep thinking of my favourite New York dive when I flick through the papers of a morning.

That is because Scotland’s politics and media community is going through one of its periodic feeding frenzies about how much ministers spend on their travels, not least in the Big Apple.

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One recent-ish row was about Scotland’s external affairs minister, or, as the tabloids call him, Angus “Air Miles” Robertson.

The Daily Express revealed that the cab sec was put up at a four-star hotel near Times Square when he and a posse of civil servants descended on America’s annual Tartan Week. The horror!

Mr Robertson stayed at the £237-a-night Westin. Now I am the kind stereotypical skinflint Scot who gets the jitters at the thought of forking out more than £30-40 for a place to lay my head for the night. OK, maybe £50 for Midtown Manhattan.

But is it unreasonable for a cabinet minister on business representing our country to kip in a four-star? Not at all.

The horrible truth is that central New York – aside from ubiquitous 99c pizza slices – is bloody expensive. Do you want our ministers queuing for the hostel showers with riff-raff like me? Or sweating on the subway from a motel or AirBnB somewhere in the burbs? I don’t think so.

Should our leaders miss the opportunity for soft power and marketing offered by America’s biggest kilts-and-bagpipes cringefest? Of course not.

Personally, I can’t imagine anything worse than having to gladhandle Plastic Jocks. But that is the kind of chore facing our politicians. Maybe some of them even like this part of the job, though it is hellishly hard to get right.

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Remember Labour’s Jack McConnell doing his catwalk spin in a black skirt and getting remorselessly (and entirely unfairly, in my opinion) mocked for it. The rather less elegant Alex Salmond felt the need to stoat about America in truly terrible tartan trews.

Humiliating? Of course it was. But surely not as embarrassing as what happened to poor Annie Wells this week.

The Tory Glasgow list MSP’s name was plastered all over quotes slating Humza Yousaf for his “eye-watering” stay in a £690-a-night hotel when he went to the Big Smoke on government business.

“It is wrong,” the backbencher is supposed to have said, "that hardworking Scots are footing an enormous bill for the First Minister to be living the high life in London, especially when so many are struggling with a cost-of-living crisis.”

I can’t speak for hardworking Scots but as a lazy cheapskate with a soft spot for Covent Garden Travelodge I admit that Mr Yousaf’s room sounds helluva dear to me. But I am not sure I am in a position to judge what security and other services a first minister needs on the road. Neither, of course, is Ms Wells.

The timing of the Conservatives’ cretinous and hypocritical attack could not have been worse. In the same news cycle Rishi Sunak popped up to Aberdeen on his private jet. Scottish nationalists quickly highlighted Conservative hypocrisy.

The Prime Minister fell apart when challenged on his trip by BBC Radio Scotland’s Martin Geissler. Gleeful Tory-bashers leapt at another opportunity to point and laugh at Richie Rich Rishi. Was this fair? Probably not. Just because the PM proved unable to articulate a defence for his kerosene-and-cash-guzzling flight does not mean there was not one.

Again, as an, erm, canny Scot the first place I am going to look for tickets to Aberdeen is Flixbus, the Ryanair of the A90. But I can see why the leader of a nuclear-armed G7 power might need to take his own jet.

Let us drop the pretence that politicians and officials can Zoom all their announcements and conduct all their business over the blower. They need to get about, meet people and, well, do stuff.

And I mean ALL of them – even those you might disagree with, even those who represent political constructs you may see as illegitimate, whether Holyrood or Westminster.

So why do parties, their press proxies and their social media drone armies waste so much energy on slagging each others’ travel bills? Well, because they want to weaponise dummy-grade populist anti-politics against their opponents.

A few reporters play this game too. It is easy to request routine travel expenses under Freedom of Information laws and then publish them in stories laced with innuendo about the lavish lifestyles of politicians. This is an “easy hit” as we hacks say. But – sorry, colleagues – it is also a grotesque parody of proper investigative journalism, especially when it appears partisan.

Take New York. Mr Robertson’s team was not the only one to represent Scotland at this year’s Tartan Week. His gang was backed up by a delegation from Westminster which included Douglas Ross. Good. That is exactly the kind of thing MPs should be doing.

There has been little right-wing newspaper curiosity about where the Scottish Tory leader bunked. Hey, maybe he kipped in a plywood shed in some attic and had a 99c slice for his tea. But I doubt he was in a Penthouse, not my kind and not the posh kind either. He was just doing his job, as was Mr Robertson.