The slinkie of Scottish politics

Poor Alistair Carmichael, it wasn’t enough for him that he got away on a technicality with lying through his teeth to the voters during last years General Election, he wanted vengeance on the little people who had the temerity to challenge his right to lie his way into office. On Monday the judges ruled against him, and now the liar will have to be honest about his own legal bills instead of passing them off onto the people who tried to hold him to account. The bruiser has been financially bruised. Alistair Carmichael is the slinkie of Scottish politics, bugger all use for anything but you can’t help but smile when he takes a tumble down the stairs of the Court of Session.

Alistair used to be arrogant and obnoxious, but as a result of the court case he was found to be just the opposite, obnoxious and arrogant. After getting away with the main charge laid against him, Alistair was lulled into a false sense of competence. Alistair thought that winning the right to keep his seat meant he was proven to be in the right and was entirely vindicated, when in the eyes of the entire country he was revealed as a liar who managed to cling onto his seat by virtue of a technicality and had a nose that Pinocchio could use for pole dancing. The former Scottish secretary’s lasting contribution to Scottish politics is in establishing that Westminster politicians think that it’s perfectly acceptable and proper to lie to the electorate.

When considering the character of Alistair Carmichael, we should remember that this is not merely a man who has been legally determined to be an evasive and self-serving liar. We should also remember that he didn’t just expect the Orkney Four to pay for his legal bills, he wanted them to pay punitive damages as well. Alistair Carmichael was not just deceitful and didn’t just lie about his deceit, he also thought that he shouldn’t have to suffer any consequences for his lies and deceit. Alistair was not content with costing the taxpayers large amounts of money for an enquiry into the leak, an enquiry which could have been avoided if Alistair had just said – it was me, I did it.

That wasn’t enough for the inflated ego of Orkney. He wanted the people who had called him out for lying to be punished for his lies by paying him money over and above his legal costs so that he’d end up financially better off than he had started. That’s his real arrogance and entitlement, on top of everything else that he did, he wanted to be rewarded for his lies and demanded that he should profit from them even if that was at the expense of bankrupting his aggrieved constituents.

The judges had ruled that Alistair is a liar, and that he had lied and was mendacious. That puts Alistair into that rare category of people. Like Andy Coulson, like Jeffrey Archer, you can call Alistair a liar in print and he can’t sue you for it. In their ruling the judges during the original case wrote that Alistair told a “blatant lie”. He is a proven liar. It was just fortunate for the liar that his lie didn’t fall within the narrowly defined criteria necessary to rule that his election was illegal. Alistair thought that this vindicated him, when in fact all it did was to prove that he was still a liar. He’s such a liar that whenever he enters a room he sets off the smoke alarm from the fire in his pants.

Naturally the mad bag of spanners that constitutes the Scottish Unionist media is linking foul mouthed wingnuts in solidarity with the poor wronged Alistair. The real wrong in their eyes isn’t that a Unionist politician smeared the First Minister with a false allegation, then lied about it, then tried to ruin his constituents after they tried to hold him to account for it. That’s perfectly acceptable. Of course it is. What sort of world would it be if ordinary punters were able to challenge members of the establishment and answer back to journalists? It would be chaos. Chaos which might very well lead to uppitiness and cheeking your betters. What do you think this is, a democracy?

The real wrong if you’re a mad spanner is that ordinary people who aren’t licenced journalists or politicians had the nerve to get above their station and raise their own funds to pursue a case against a lying politician. It’s perfectly fine with the yoonatic media that politicians lie, as long as they are lying Unionists. Lies are only an issue to be condemned when they issue from a pro-indy politician.

Of course the latest development in the Orkney Saga was reported by our state broadcaster. There was a single sentence snatched from the gnashed teeth of Jackie Bird, and sandwiched between a report on doggy IQs and one on how the UK had a new UK gas field for the UK, which is very good news for the UK but not for Scotland because volatile, bad. If it had been an SNP MP who had been ordered to pay their own legal costs after a controversial court case in which they’d been legally ruled to be a liar, the liary liarness of liardom would have taken up over half the programme. Not that it would have eaten into any of the time devoted to the fitba or the cute animals however, because this is Reporting Scotland Patronisingly we’re discussing here.

It remains unclear exactly how much Alistair will have to cough up in legal bills although a figure of up to £150,000 has been cited in some sources. Unlike the Orkney Four whose online fundraiser covered the entire amount that they may have had to pay out, his own online fundraiser has only managed to raise a small proportion of the amount, less than 10% of the amount he’s likely to owe. So much for pooling and sharing. If there was any justice he would have to pay the costs of the government enquiry as well. Still, he should consider himself lucky. Now Alistair will never be forgotten – at least not by the lawyers if he misses a couple of payments.

Hell slap it intae him. Let’s hope that the slinkie of Scottish politics slinks out of the public eye.

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