When John Swinney encouraged Americans to vote for Kamala Harris at the US presidential elections of November, I wondered if he was standing up for a alone slab modest cake.
It turns out that I was wrong. It was not a cake, it was a modest teaake. According to news reports, this was served at the Bute House -Meeting the Prime Minister with Eric Trump: Tunnock's Teacakes, Caramel Wafers and Chocolate Chip Shortbread.
The Scottish government insisted that the meeting was strictly about business. The son of the president is executive vice -president of the Trump organization and is ultimately responsible for the golf courses of the company in Balmedie and Turnberry.
Swinney was just busy with an important employer in Scotland.
Most business leaders The prime minister meetings have never branded him 'filthy' before denouncing their father's jaw to the media.
That is point one. For point two we turn to the statement of the Scottish green co-leader Lorna Slater: “When it comes to the Trumps, the line between things and politics is always blurred.”
No matter how much I hate this sentence to write this sentence, Lorna Slater is right. Eric Trump is not only a businessman who happens to be related to the American president.
He is a senior executive in his father's company, was a speaker at the Republican National Convention last July and appeared on Fox News the night after the elections to talk about Papa's victory.
Eric Trump enjoyed a cuppa last week with prime minister Humza Yousaf in Bute House before checking progress on the new golf course of the Trump organization in Aberdenshire
In any case, sit with the man, but try not to pretend that there is no political meaning for the Confab.
It is not the first reconciliation noise to publish from Bute House, because Trump SNR's re -election.
Swinney ran from Harris supporter to Trump Sycophant with such an alacrity that he tweeted his congratulations 13 minutes before the Associated Press called the elections.
Then he shot a letter that crawled more than a centipede and told the returning president that he “had worked hard to form the United States in a global power.”
He told the questions of the prime minister that he would deal with the White House to promote the interests of Scotland, despite the views of people about the president. “
The guy did anything but a red cap and sing 'Build the wall'. What a difference 77 million votes and a budget of $ 7 trillion.
Responding to the meeting of Swinney with Trump Fils, Russell Findlay called the prime minister “a shameless hypocritical and opportunist.”
Donald Trump may have won the presidency twice, against all the opportunities, but his son is the real political miracle worker: he let Lorna Slater and Russell Findlay agree on something.
John Swinney's interference in American politics has not held a favors
The Scottish conservative leader punishes Swinney as an opportunist, but there is no crime in opportunism.
If you are the head of the government in a small country, with the most powerful man in the world who hits rates left and right, a dash of cynicism and a great blob of pragmatism are very in order.
Jobs, investments and economic growth are at stake.
It would be easy to damage your nose for Trump and deny his many mistakes, but it would also be reckless and indulgent.
The kilos in people's pockets should come before piety and pontification.
I am not so enthusiastic about the man himself, and there I am in good company. Polling from earlier this month showed that 71 percent of Scottish adults have an unfavorable picture of Trump.
But he is the President of the United States, with an ego the size of the Empire State Building, a hair trigger mood and a Hanke to annex countries and areas who take his imagination.
Every prime minister who decided to combat such a man would have fallen into his duty towards the country.
I would give Swinney the honor to work with Trump and his business interests if he had been so cunning from the start.
If he had studied the race of 2016, and Triocrats' unpredicted triumph over the Democrats and the regular media, and Ca'ed Canny on the content of 2024, otherwise the AppleCart would be upset a second time.
Instead, Swinney stepped into the purity trap.
He bought the myth that a political leader is a sound agent, obliged to take a position on every matter of the day.
The prime minister is neither a spiritual nor a moral philosopher. We don't look at him for ethical guidance. We pay him to run the country.
I hate to burst their bubbles, but politicians are not a special breed.
They can be elitist in their contempt for the regular punt, but few are elite in competence or historical significance.
See ministers as car mechanics, only instead of checking your oil and replacing your spark plugs, is the engine that is asked to maintain Scotland.
Tighten the loose screws in the NHS, enhance the standards in education and keep the economy smooth.
Do you schelt which American politician prefers your car mechanic? Would it ever come up in you to ask?
Do you probably bring your habit elsewhere if you discover that his political views differ from yours?
Of course not. You want it to repair your motorcycle and not save the world.
Swinney would not have been left as a dual poll tower if he simply decreased from involving himself in Foreign Affairs. (We really need a law that outlines which powers have been transferred to Holyrood and they have been reserved at Westminster. We could call it the Scotland act.)
This is about more than a prime minister who refuses to stay in his constitutional job.
There is barely a week without a new cause or craze sticking to Holyrood, that Palace of Pomposity.
The reverses change, the Lanyards are changed, but the air of self -satisfied moral certainty remains.
Some would call this virtue signaling, but what they actually signal is their own interest.
If Westminster politicians can give an opinion about something, then their holy red must be because they are just as good and it is an insult to suggest otherwise.
First things first: MSPs are not the same as MPS. MPs are in a sovereign parliament. MSPs are in a body that owes its existence to that parliament and his willingness to delegate his powers.
Secondly, if it is offensive to remind MSPs that their job revolves around Scottish schools, hospitals and crime, and not greatness about Maga or Gaza, how contemptuous should they feel in the direction of the tasks they were chosen to perform?
The purity trap is not only unbearably arrogant and self -glorifying, it is a distraction for a parliament that has more than enough problems in his assignment to concentrate.
Is the Bearing gap closed without us noticing? Wait 18 months for the NHS suddenly a thing of the past?
Has the public financial crisis in the local government resolved itself at the weekend? If not, most voters would rather focus on Holyrood's attention to those things than the ranks of the 'resistance' to Donald Trump.
John Swinney puffed himself and stuck his nose in American politics, just to let American voters beat the wind out of him.
Discharged, and perhaps even the cotor, is now forced to take with the man whose defeat he encouraged.
Hat is humiliating for him, but more importantly, it is embarrassing for Scotland.
In the spirit of Donald Trump, let's offer the prime minister a deal: we will be interested in what he thinks about the problems of other nations as soon as he has finished solving the problems of this.
