The Scottish government and the Scottish media are like a pair of Siamese twins who cannot stand the sight of each other. Congenitally linked, they are stuck with each other. They are dependent on the same supplies of life-blood and nourishment, yet treat one another with rancour and undisguised contempt.
To say the relationship between the government and the media, particularly the press pack, has made a bad beginning is a whopping understatement. The Labour-Lib Dem administration does not need an opposition in the Edinburgh parliament. It has one ready-made in the press gallery.
Commentators have been caustic, news stories relentlessly embarrassing, leader columns constantly disdainful of the fledgling efforts of Donald Dewar’s administration to get off the ground. The summer recess should have been a restful period in which the Scottish executive could regroup and the parliament reassess itself and the self-inflicted damage to its public image. Instead it has been a summer of discontent and disapproval, and the MSPs are returning to lectures from leader-writers about the need for a collective pulling-up of socks, with dire warnings to the Dewar team about what will happen if they do not make devolution live up to expectations.
Given the nature of the beasts, the poisonous partnership between parliament and press had an awful inevitability. The Scottish press are more aggressive than their London colleagues, their scrutiny more intense and more unforgiving. There is also an element of the Scottish “we kent them when they were nothing” attitude. Whereas that familiarity formerly bred mateyness, it now breeds an unhealthy contempt, particularly when ministers are stand-offish with journalists they once courted.
The main reason for the fractious relationship, however, has been in the performance and attitude of the administration. The pattern was set when the First Minister deliberately created a news vacuum by refusing to play the public relations game. If nature abhors a vacuum, the media are driven to a frenzy by one. News organisations have invested heavily from over-strained budgets to cover the new democracy in Edinburgh, and the voracious appetite for news and comment must be fed. And the less that comes from official sources, the more will be scavenged from unofficial avenues – the discontented, the axe-grinders, the mischief- makers and the promotion-seekers.
Hence the stories about the infighting among ministers vying to be Dewar’s successor, culminating in the disastrous briefing by the First Minister’s spin-doctor, casting doubt on the qualifications of the entire Scottish cabinet. And hence the blow-by-blow account of the “turf war” between Dewar and the Scottish Secretary, John Reid. We were assured it was non-existent – but it was all too real in the briefings by Westminster MPs and Edinburgh MSPs protecting their own patches.
Neither could the media ignore the administration’s blatant bungles. We would have been failing in our duty if we had not pitched into the botched transport policy, the apparent paralysis in the face of threatened job losses, the failure to prevent the release into society of the psychopathic “Kalashnikov” killer, Noel Ruddle, or the nonsense of a bill to ban fox-hunting before health, housing, drugs and more urgent priorities are addressed. The paradox is that the Scottish media want the parliament to be a success. Apart from having invested too much for it to be a flop, they are mostly unionist and do not want a nationalist takeover.
Already it has become dangerously like the “pretendy parliament” of Billy Connolly’s scornful dismissal, and that way lies the disillusion that plays into the hands of the independence party. The parliament-press squabbling will be worthwhile if it wakes up the Scottish administration to that danger. We may not be able to pick our Siamese twin, but we can at least get it to smarten itself up.
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