AS YOU might have noticed over the weekend, The National turned five.
It’s pretty incredible that in this short half-decade we are now covering our sixth election – three general, one Scottish, one council and one European.
Sometimes we think founding editor Richard Walker’s real genius was not so much his idea to start a paper that was pro-independence, but his canny timing of starting a newspaper just months before the UK went tonto.
This election, however, feels much more chaotic than the other democratic exercises we’ve experienced in The National’s lifetime.
Maybe that’s because it’s winter, maybe it’s because the campaign feels like it’s been going on for months now, or maybe it’s because of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn.
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The prospect of either man becoming prime minister seems preposterous and yet on Friday 13 – or in the days that follow – one of them will be on their way to Buckingham Palace to assure the monarch that they have the support of the majority of MPs in the House of Commons and can form a government.
At the moment, the polls predict that it’ll be Boris Johnson, but we’ve still got two weeks to go and anything can happen.
Yesterday at the SNP’s manifesto launch, Nicola Sturgeon made clear, again, that her MPs would only offer their support to a Labour government.
The SNP had, she said, more in common socially and economically with the party of the left than they did the party of the right.
The biggest laugh of the event came when a journalist from Channel 5 asked the First Minister to spell out why she thought Johnson was unfit to be Prime Minister.
“I’m happy to do that,” Sturgeon replied, “unfortunately we don’t have the let on this space for that long”.
The First Minister complained that she faced a choice “between the devil and the deep blue sea”.
The problem for the SNP leader is that by renouncing Satan and all his work, she is now being asked to explain why she’s fine and dandy in the cold depths of Corbyn’s murky waters.
On Tuesday, the Chief Rabbi warned that Corbyn’s inability to deal with the anti-Semitism in Labour meant “the very soul of the nation” was at stake.
This is a fight that is not the First Minister’s. This is a fight she and the SNP most definitely don’t want. But it’s fight they might have to have.
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Callum Baird, Editor of The National
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