The SNP has always liked its trite stunts. Rebellious Scots Jim Sillars and Alex Salmond, and now Ian Blackford, have all been conveniently kicked out of parliament in recent decades. Salmond, fresh from appearing on Call My Bluff back in 1999, produced a pilfered card with the word “bluff” on it as Tony Blair laid into the Nats at a lunch in Glasgow; the massive new intake of SNP MPs in 2015 occupied the Labour benches and declared themselves “the official opposition”; there was a deliberately disruptive period of repeated applause in parliament by that same cocky group.
Most of these stunts have been cheap. Few of them have been amusing or dignified. All of them managed to create headlines in the next day’s papers and ostensibly show the party “standing up for Scotland”: so, job done.
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