Sketch: Lack of PPE in Holyrood means the gloves are off

PPE to the Holyood chamber STAT. And possibly some phials of anti-venom too.

Nicola Sturgeon has faced two days of heated exchanges in the Holyrood chamber.

After yesterday’s bad-tempered FMQs, today’s announcement by Nicola Sturgeon on the next steps out of lockdown, confirmed that the latex gloves had well and truly been disposed of.

The bin for needles and other sharps also began to fill as the veneer of a cross-party agreement on tackling the coronavirus pandemic, didn't just split, but shattered as poisoned barbs were exchanged across the floor.

Perhaps Jackson Carlaw had been hoping to spend the weekend with a cold glass of rose in a beer garden, for he was extremely vexed with what he heard from the First Minister. Even Ms Sturgeon’s smirk at the idea that couples who don’t live together could now meet indoors without social distancing, raised nothing more than a skeptical Tory eyebrow.

His voice dripping with scorn, he declared that Nicola Sturgeon “just didn’t get it”, that she didn’t understand the depth of the economic challenges facing Scotland as a result of the pandemic, and that her ministers were spending too much of their time on Twitter scolding journalists rather than getting on with the day job. Ambition, he also said, was wanting in the government’s approach to getting the economy and education up and running.

For his temerity to be trip-trapping across the bridge of consensus, the First Minister not only branded the benches behind him social media “trolls” but declared in her best disappointed voice, that it was “regrettable that Jackson Carlaw is incapable of rising to the challenge of a national crisis”.

Despite having no mask or visor, Mr Carlaw refused to shield, or to yield. To the jeers of SNP MSPs, he said while he welcomed the latest measures to ease lockdown, he did so “a fortnight ago when they were announced elsewhere with much derision from her”.

The First Minister bristled: “That would have been utterly reckless and put lives at risk, that’s why increasing numbers of people are glad Jackson Carlaw is not standing in this position. Reaching for one of her more well-worked put-downs, she said Mr Carlaw, a noted fan of Bob Dylan, “blows with the wind, or rather blows in whatever direction his colleagues in Westminster tell him too.”

By this time, the consensual relationship between government and opposition over tackling Covid-19 was in intensive care. Reacting to Ms Sturgeon’s statement that she was consistently talking to business organisations, Mr Carlaw carped: “I hope she's not just talking to organisations but listening to them as well – she needs to – she needs all the help she can get.”

Nicola Sturgeon was having none of it. “If Jackson Carlaw just wants to continue to snipe from the sidelines then I will leave him to do that, because I’ve got hard work to do.”

The Holyrood elections are now less than a year away. Despite it not being mentioned on the lockdown route map, it would seem that normal political business has resumed faster than any other.

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