WHEN you’ve got a lot on your plate it can be hard to remember every little detail.
That’s a lesson that Douglas Ross - who is currently working four jobs - is learning the hard way.
It seems that in between leading the Scottish Tories, representing the Highlands and Islands at Holyrood, and running the lines at football matches, Ross has little time left to look at the details when it comes to representing Moray at Westminster.
That would be one explanation for the absolute car crash of a grilling which he attempted to give Carol Anderson, branch banking director at TSB, at the Scottish Affairs Committee earlier this week.
READ MORE: Demand for Douglas Ross to apologise for 'vile' Tory attack on Janey Godley
Anderson, who works for TSB (at the risk of repeating ourselves, but it will be important in a minute), had told Ross: “In Forres, we know that 84% of the business customers use mobile, online, telephone banking.”
This sentence proved a little tricky for the Scots Tory leader.
He interrupted to ask: “What do you mean by ‘mobile, online, telephone’? Do you mean mobile, online and telephone?”
If that question looks ridiculous written down, wait till you hear him say it.
And what started poorly soon got even worse.
He then demanded to know: “Why are you not putting a mobile bank into Forres?” only to be told the conversation had been about mobile banking “as in the mobile app”, not a moveable bank.
But Ross wanted to talk about a moveable bank, and talk he would.
The transcript of the exchange reads:
- Douglas Ross: You also invested heavily in the Moray Rambler to get out and about in communities... Do you know about the Moray Rambler?
- Carol Anderson: No.
- Douglas Ross: That is the name for the TSB mobile banking in Moray. You are not aware of that.
- Carol Anderson: No. The mobile money confidence expert?
- Douglas Ross: No. The Moray Rambler is the van that goes around Moray and stops in communities where the banks have been withdrawn.
- Carol Anderson: No, that is not us. We do not have a van.
- Douglas Ross: It works out of the Elgin branch.
- Carol Anderson: No, that is definitely not us.
- Douglas Ross: Okay. We may come back to that.
We suggest watching the whole two minutes if you’d like to see how effective a questioner Douglas Ross really is.
The Moray Rambler is real, it’s just run by the Royal Bank of Scotland - not TSB.
To be fair to Ross, it only says that in huge lettering on the van’s front, and the sides, and the back.
SNP MP Deidre Brock, who had the unfortunate honour of having to sit through the commitee hearing, told the Jouker: “Oh dear. Clearly Mr Ross is so overburdened with his many jobs he can’t quite recall who provides what services in Moray.
"His constituents will rightly be questioning the lack of local knowledge and attention to detail he reveals in this embarrassing clip.”
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