New prime minister Rishi Sunak’s decision to reappoint Suella Braverman as home secretary just six days after she was sacked for breaching the ministerial code will haunt him.
It was entirely predictable that Braverman’s presence in his cabinet would overshadow his talk of unity and service and doing the right thing. Voters are not fools.
We understand that the woman sacked by Liz Truss last week is back in the Home Office not because she is the best person for the job, but because her appointment placates the Conservatives’ wingnut right.
So, Sunak should expect – and deserves – continued pressure from opposition politicians. He has gifted them a bottomless barrel of fish and a 12 bore shotgun.
According to the SNP, the reappointment of Braverman – who used a private email account to send confidential documents to a Tory backbencher – shows that “grubby deals and scandals remain at the heart of the Westminster system”.
The nationalists’ home affairs spokesman, Stuart McDonald, it will not surprise you to learn, insists it is now essential that we Scots rid ourselves “of this corrupt and dysfunctional Westminster system for good”.
Piety is never in short supply in the SNP ranks. Nor, I’m afraid, is hypocrisy.
What do they say about political parties in glass houses?
I wonder whether McDonald believes it was Westminster that made former SNP chief whip, Patrick Grady, abuse his position of authority in order to sexually harass a junior member of staff? Was evil Westminster to blame for the decision of the nationalists’ leader in the Commons, Ian Blackford, to call Grady’s victim to a meeting with the man who harassed him?
And what about the botched handling of a number of allegations of inappropriate behaviour levelled against former first minister, Alex Salmond?
So powerful is the malign influence of Westminster that it appears to be able to create scandal at Holyrood.
How else can we explain the actions of the former SNP finance secretary, Derek Mackay, who was forced to resign from cabinet after it emerged he’d bombarded a 16-year-old boy with messages, describing him as “cute” and urging him to meet. It must also have been Westminster that made the Scottish Government try to hush that scandal up, arguing that it was a private matter.
And what about the botched handling of a number of allegations of inappropriate behaviour levelled against former first minister, Alex Salmond – the man Nicola Sturgeon once described as the least sexist she had ever met – which led to the Scottish Government paying him more than £500,000 of taxpayers’ cash? Was that down to Westminster, too?
I could go on, listing the scandals on Sturgeon’s watch – the undelivered ferries, the not-fit-for-purpose new build hospitals, the decision to send infected patients into care homes at the height of the coronavirus pandemic – that must have been caused by Westminster.
Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party is a moral swamp, but Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP is lobbing rocks from inside a huge glass house.
Euan McColm is a regular columnist for various Scottish newspapers
Conversation