John McLellan: Alex Salmond shows off skills in footwork and point-scoring

HE WAS, as the late Bill McLaren might have put it, quicker to spot the opportunity than a baggie up a Borders burn. In fact, the opportunity to exploit last weekend’s Calcutta Cup one way or another might have been spotted some time ago by First Minister Alex Salmond and his communications squad.

From the minute contact was made – and you chose whether you believe Team Salmond’s claim he was invited to take part in the big game preview, or the BBC’s insistance that he invited himself – the First Minister was in a win-win position. No spurning the yawning two-on-one in this case. If the BBC agreed to have him on the show the First Minister would be able to display his avuncular side to a relatively new audience, but to refuse would give him the chance to play the offside rule. His advisers will doubtless deny such a Machiavellian plot, but they have certainly gone down the BBC’s blind side with a relish unseen since Gavin Hastings and Tony Stanger did to England in 1990 what the side so ineptly failed to do two weekends ago.

Yet perhaps Mr Salmond has a point, for who sprung up on the national news last week to give us his views on the resignation of England football manager Fabio Capello than Prime Minister David Cameron. Now he might know a thing or two about the Eton Wall Game, but his knowledge of soccer is not something of which most of us are aware. So what of the BBC’s impartiality rules on that occasion? Did Ed Miliband back ’Arry Redknapp for the job? Would Nick Clegg ask Vince Cable to look at Capello’s severance deal? We’ll never know.

Apparently both the local government elections and “heightened political tensions” did for Mr Salmond, yet there are local government elections in England and Wales this year too. The truth is that the BBC is bound by regulations on which all parties leap to their own advantage. Tony Blair’s spin chief Alastair Campbell harried the Corporation remorselessly throughout his time in Number 10 and it can hardly be a surprise if the highly-efficient and driven SNP team does the same. Yesterday it was reported that Fiona Hyslop, the SNP cabinet secretary or culture, had complained about BBC lacking neutrality in its reporting using phrases like “divorce” and “break up”. We can expect much more where that came from.

The mistake here was for anyone at the BBC to believe Mr Salmond going on about a sport of which he knows little would have any impact on a vote in 2014 and if anything, he was more likely to be tripped up through lack of knowledge. And as far as the rugby audience is concerned, Mr Salmond might have noticed that while the crowd gave England kicker Charlie Hodgson a fair bit of bird, God Save the Queen was sung with some gusto with barely a boo or a whistle to be heard.

On his part, his mistake was to invoke the Third Reich. The Nationalists might deny it, but words like that matter. In last week’s Scotsman, former John Swinney aide Ewan Crawford argued passionately against the use of the term separatism as a synonym for independence. His point is well made, but nonetheless the former is not technically inaccurate.

Technically, a gauleiter was indeed a tin-pot bureaucrat, but unfortunately only in Nazi Germany, where they played an enthusiastic part in the worst crimes against humanity the world has known. How upset would Mr Salmond have been if his handing over of the Calcutta Cup to Chris Robshaw was described as a Jesse Owens moment?

BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten’s invitation to Mr Salmond to lodge a formal complaint has kicked the issue into touch for now, but behind the scenes tough play will continue. Having been the recipient of a complaint to the PCC by Mr Salmond a few years ago, I can vouch for that.

Gap at the PCC

The Press Complaints Commission’s director Stephen Abell has, as speculated here a fortnight ago, duly announced his resignation and will leave at the end of this month to join Pagefield Communications.

The gap he leaves will not be easy to fill, and with the appointment of PCC chairman Lord Hunt’s long-time political assistant Michael McManus to take over in a temporary role as director of transition, the future direction of self-regulation is firmly in the chairman’s hands.