Drumlanrig: Salmond takes issue with newspaper attack

INFORMATION released to the Leveson inquiry last week by Alex Salmond included a handful of letters from the FM to various newspaper proprietors and editors questioning the content of their publications.

A special earful is reserved for DC Thomson’s chairman Andrew Thomson after the Courier newspaper published a critical piece by columnist John J Marshall about Salmond, in the run up to the 2010 general election.

“I usually shrug my shoulders at these things, but this stands out as perhaps the worst and most personalised attack I have ever experienced,” declared a shocked First Minister. How bad? “Certainly far worse than anything that even the Daily Mail has written about me.” That bad! Salmond attached a four-page memo setting the record straight on the piece.

Have a blether with Liz over a large dram

Do “poetry and whisky gang thegither?, asked Scotland’s redoubtable makar Liz Lochhead at the water-of-life-fuelled bash to celebrate the 100th birthday of the Scotch Whisky Association last week. Lochhead had been commissioned to write a poem about the glory of whisky to mark the event and, borrowing and adapting a Burns line to fit, she posed the question about the fellowship found in a glass. “Consider. Answer. Aye, right well thegither,” she wrote. “Though – taken by the jug-fu – either yin’s reduced to blether.” She went on to remark that everyone should limit themselves to just one dram a day “as long as it’s a large dram”.

Highland games says no to political posters

The SNP MSP for Strathkelvin and Bearsden Fiona McLeod has been making a name for herself on the Highland games circuit. No, she’s not discovered a talent for tossing the caber. But she did go her local games and take a photograph of a “Yes Scotland” poster being held up outside the arena. She then tweeted the picture with the caption “Bearsden and Milngavie Highland Games says Yes”. Her suggestion that the games had come out in support of independence did not go down well with her political opponents.

“I don’t think people here will welcome this kind of thing,” said Rhondda Geekie, Labour’s East Dunbartonshire council leader. “The Bearsden & Milngavie Highland Games is a great community event and should not be politicised like this.

“For an MSP to take to the internet to claim they support independence, when the organisers are completely non-political, is pretty bad.”