Michael Matheson: What is the point of this iPad witchhunt?

As I write, Mr Matheson is preparing a statement for the Scottish Parliament. As you read, he may even have resigned. This whole episode has a depressing degree of familiarity about it.

This is Scotland and, of course, instead of attempting to engage in any sort of intellectually and politically meaningful debate on our many problems, we like to choose tittle-tattle and frivolity.

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We have been here before, and we particularly like to defenestrate people of quality for unimportant things. This is not party-political. Today we are trying to do it to a nationalist, and we’ve done that before (remember when Stewart Stevenson resigned as Transport Minister because it snowed?). But we have done it before to Labour politicians, including First Minister Henry McLeish and leader Wendy Alexander, and to Tories such as David McLetchie, the best leader that party has had.

As one of Mr McLetchie’s senior staff, people from across politics often say to me now that it was a storm in a teacup and he really shouldn’t have resigned. Well, then maybe, when I was working 18-hour days to try to keep him in his job, you shouldn’t have been sticking the boot in and briefing the press to push him out, you two-faced oaf.

Holyrood’s Tories, in particular, and Labour, to a degree, are energised by this week’s developments, and the mouth-foaming unionists on Twitter haven’t slept for three days. There is no moral superiority here - if the shoe had been on the other foot, the SNP and the nationalist Twitter moon-howlers would be behaving in exactly the same way.

I wonder if, at some point, we might ask ourselves what the point is of all this. I wonder if some of the MSPs who have dedicated their entire week to pushing the resignation of the Health Secretary have any self-reflection. Have they thought that this is exactly what the other lot did to their leaders and colleagues in the past? Have they contemplated that they may be next because of that time seven years ago when they charged a Mars bar as a parliamentary expense?

I doubt it. This is, after all, the revolving door of what is becoming an increasingly silly, frivolous Scottish Parliament. Last night, giving the Donald Dewar memorial lecture, SNP MSP Fergus Ewing lamented the “virtue-signalling” of the Scottish Parliament and the lack of “formidable politicians”, and he is of course correct.

As Holyrood’s powers grow, and as Scotland’s problems become more serious, our politics becomes more fatuous.

If the opposition decide they want to go after Michael Matheson, there is plenty to talk about. The NHS has crumbled (tense intentional). We invest roughly the same as the average OECD country in our health service and yet we have fewer doctors and nurses, fewer beds, less kit, and poorer outcomes. Earlier this week in The Herald, launching Reform Scotland’s NHS48 debating forum, former NHS Scotland Chief Executive Paul Gray said that the NHS “is not sustainable in its present form... we have three problems. The first is that more of everything is not available. The second is that more of everything is not affordable. And the third is that more of everything is not right.”

And yet, despite having been an extremely well-regarded and competent Cabinet Secretary in his previous roles, and despite the gravity of the health service’s problems, Mr Matheson has been relatively quiet since enthusiastically accepting his move to Health earlier this year. Have a go at that, lads.

If I, God forbid, were an MSP, I’d also be asking questions of the Scottish Parliamentary authorities, in the knowledge that this could have happened to any of them. Mr Matheson, seemingly, was warned several times to change his SIM card and failed to do so; perhaps he was busy running the Government’s largest department. However as an MSP I would be horrified to be put in this position at all, and I would expect that if my SIM needed changed then the IT department would come to my office and change it for me. I’d also expect that the Parliament’s procurement team would simply not allow an effectively expired tariff to bill me £11,000 for an amount of data which we should expect to cost less than £10.

Perhaps the other MSPs don’t need to ask these questions. Perhaps the other 128 have never, ever, used their Parliament iPad to watch Celtic, or The Crown, or perhaps a quick episode of Made in Chelsea. Bravo to them, for they are virtuous.

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The Scottish Parliament is not blessed with a critical mass of heavy-hitting politicians. There are lots of reasons for that, amongst them that the party systems are geared towards picking the loyal ahead of the good, and that the salary of an MSP is not nearly enough to convince the best and the brightest to swap their current careers for a life in which everyone thinks they deserve to know where your children go to school and how much you pay for your shoes.

Michael Matheson, as I know from my many professional interactions, is one of the best. And so here, this week, we have another defining moment for our politics. By the time you read this, it is not impossible that Humza Yousaf will be looking for a new Health Secretary, that a gap in his Cabinet will need filled, and that by consequence a gap in his ministerial team will need filled.

Who wins from this? Who are the beneficiaries? NHS patients? No. The public purse? No. The opposition? No - they’ll have a laugh in the bar but there are no votes in it.

The answer is nobody. Nobody wins. We just go round again, looking for the next unimportant non-scandal.

Well done, everyone. Slow handclap.