When Donald Dewar sacked his policy adviser and right-hand man John Rafferty he may have dismayed Millbank and No 10, but he certainly put some of the pep back into Scottish politics. All at once Holyrood began to look like a real political forum. The mask of consensus had slipped. First Minister Dewar was at bay, and it showed. The opposition had scented blood and were nipping at his flanks. Ostensibly Rafferty’s sin was fibbing to the press about death threats to the Health Minister, Susan Deacon, but there is plainly more to it than that. Dewar himself said that “wider circumstances” had led him to dump Rafferty, although what these circumstances were he refused to say.
Meanwhile Labour insiders are hinting that Rafferty was the loser in a “turf war” with Dewar’s spinmeister David Whitton, and that while Whitton may have won a battle, the war was far from over. The SNP and the Tories are having a whale of a time solemnly extracting “important lessons” of “accountability” from the stramash and demanding to know the size of Rafferty’s publicly funded pay-off. The figure of £100,000 is being bandied about – not bad redundancy for less than a year in the job.
We are all now waiting to see if Millbank (or Ir’n Broon) will parachute someone in to try to sort out the squabbling Jocks. If the Labour brass are planning such a venture, this diary suggests they make it one of those in-the-dark, black-parachute, high-altitude, low-opening (Halo) drops in which our more secretive military folk specialise. Otherwise the SNP and the Tories will have a field day (or week) ridiculing the First Minister and his Scottish executive as creatures of London.
It seems to have passed unnoticed that the Ministry of Defence has given the United States navy permission to blow the stuffing out of the north-west tip of Scotland. Having been ousted by irate locals from its firing range on the coast of Puerto Rico, the US navy will be turning its guns on the coast of Scotland, courtesy of the MoD. In February and March next year the cliffs to the east of Cape Wrath will echo to the sound of American high explosives.
Given the size of the US coastline (the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific), this diary finds it odd that the matelots of the USA cannot find a quiet corner of their own land to demolish.
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