The National:

WHO could have possibly predicted it? Alex Salmond returns to politics with a partly Gaelic party name, and UK political journalists appear a little confused by it, to say the least.

“Alba” is really not an obscure word. Even non-Gaelic speakers in Scotland see it everywhere in their daily lives – on road signs, trains and emergency service vehicles.

But apparently some London-based reporters only associate it with one thing, and that’s the BBC Alba channel.

READ MORE: Alba Party Scotland: Alex Salmond makes his return to politics

Of course you don’t need us to tell you that Alba simply means Scotland in Gaelic, and the BBC Alba channel is so named because it is a national Gaelic-language channel.

So no, the Alba Party is not named after BBC Alba. Unless Alex Salmond has found a new passion for the broadcaster, which seems pretty unlikely tbh.

Did John Rentoul, the chief political commentator at The Independent and a visiting professor at King’s College London, take the two seconds to google what Alba means before giving his hot take on how Salmond’s new party will impact on Scottish politics? Well, we’ll never know.

But what we do is that last night he tweeted this out to his 142.3k Twitter followers. “With Salmond’s name recognition (& party named after BBC Gaelic language channel) he can exceed 6% vote share threshold for list seat.”

We can only hope and pray that Mr Rentoul was deliberately trolling to provoke a strong reaction among his Scottish following.

His tweet prompted nearly 1000 responses. “Do you think the country you live in is named after the BBC?” asked James Doleman.

“No it’s actually named after Jessica,” wrote Kenny Stewart.

“As Kenneth MacAlpin united the Picts & Scots in 843, he wondered, what shall we call this kingdom? I know, let us name it after a BBC channel,” added another user.

Georgia Grainger responded: “I thought it was named after the signs on the roads into Scotland, which are in turn probably named after the person who put them up, Fàilte being a traditional sign-builders' name.”

We can only wonder why Salmond didn’t name the new party after STV instead.

Meanwhile, the associate editor of The Daily Telegraph, Gordon Rayner, provoked discussion with this tweet: “As a Telegraph reader has pointed out, Alex Salmond's new Alba Party presents a problem for the BBC's impartiality rules, as its Scottish language channel is called BBC Alba. Awkward.”

“Scottish language channel?” one user asked.

“You should see what the BBC calls its Welsh language radio station!” joked James Martin. Someone better tell Plaid Cymru. 

“Well the British Broadcasting Corporation seemed to get away with it despite coexisting with the British National Party so I reckon they’ll be OK,” another post said.

Ah, Gaelic. When it’s not getting Unionist bloggers “endlessly” lost on the way to Fort William, it’s causing all kinds of chaos for the UK media. Its power is unrivalled.