Martin Hannan: Stop Dawedling and resign now

When a body politic is failing, the usual response is for the head of that body to take responsibility for that failure and resign, or for he or she to be blamed and booted out of office.

Yet for some reason, Councillor Jenny Dawe seems to be Teflon-coated, despite her record of presiding over failure after abject failure by the city council of which she is leader. Her lack of leadership during the blizzards is matched only by her "dawedling" over the trams, yet still she rules.

Usually I am one of those people who believes in attacking policies and not personalities, but in the case of Dawedle, I am prepared to make an exception.

That's because last week the conduct of the Feckless Leader over the switch of Cllr Elaine Morris from the Lib Dems - or Lie Demons as I like to call them - to the SNP was offensive and inappropriate.

In case you had forgotten, I am a member of the SNP and always state that when I write about politics. Anticipating some replies to what I am about to say, I would invite the usual suspects who rant on websites to identify not only themselves but their party allegiances - then I might start to take their views seriously.

What Jenny Dawe said was straight out of the school of harpy politics. I do not know the woman personally, but I am reliably informed that Cllr Dawe is neither shrewish nor a harridan, though when she said that Morris "handed in a letter and ran down the stairs" and that "I left messages on her phone and she chose not to get back to me," you might conclude otherwise.

Dawedle slated Cllr Morris for not doing the "courteous and mature thing" of discussing matters with her colleagues. From what I hear of the Lib Dems on the council, maturity and courtesy are qualities in short supply among them, so why bother discussing things with them?

According to the Feckless Leader, Morris' letter of resignation was "rather confused . . . and wish-washy". Now here speaks a woman scorned, and hell hath no fury, etc, etc.

Given that Cllr Morris has joined the other party in the ruling coalition on the council, surely the Feckless Leader might have been considerably more diplomatic about this latest glitch - more about them later - to hit her leadership.

But now comes the "great threat" that the Feckless Leader wields - ending the coalition. The estimable Ian Swanson reports her saying that "all options" are up for discussion.

"We are still the biggest single party," said Dawedle, "but we will have to consider our position. We will be discussing how we want to play out the months before the election.

"It's now a different SNP group we are dealing with and we have to consider where we stand.

"One group member has already said to me 'Should we go it alone or look at someone else to go with?'"

That is so typical of the Feckless Leader and the Lib Dems. They can't even decide their political futures without girning in public and squirming like worms on a hook. A real leader would have said "we carry on together" or "let's end this coalition" but yet again she dawedles.

Did it not occur to her that she only retains her leadership by the fact of the coalition keeping her in the job? To deliberately antagonise the SNP in this manner is a sure way of getting what many people in my party want - her and her toxic crew out of power altogether, and if that means the SNP spending ten months in opposition then so be it, as the benefits will be reaped at the election next May. Even a rainbow coalition against the Lib Dems might be more preferable than keeping her mob in power, not least because it would halt the trams fiasco.

Being associated with the Feckless Leader is damaging the SNP. It's bad enough that she is a Liberal Democrat, a party which for most Scots is now beyond despising, but she is also synonymous with the trams, her party - and hers alone - having pushed through the plan to spend at least 240 million on completing one line to the city centre.

Some of the complaints from the Liberal Democrats suggested that Cllr Morris should resign and force a by-election as she was not elected on the SNP ticket. Fair enough, but the Liberal Democrats never stood on a platform of mortgaging the city for dozens of years to pay for a tram system nobody wants. So why don't they all resign and seek re-election on the basis of their new policy?

The more I think about it, the angrier I get. How dare this rump of a party ruled by a Feckless Leader impose this lunatic trams policy on the capital city of Scotland?

Dawedle thinks the tram problems are only "a small glitch", don't forget. The word rang a bell - I checked back in the News and there in 2008 she was telling Gina Davidson that the school closures were "a major glitch". For goodness sake, she can't even properly quantify her glitches.

It's time for the Feckless Leader and her Lib Dems to go. They have dawedled too long, and if in September they cannot find finance for their trams disaster as promised, then she and they should definitely resign en masse.