Salmond: Nixonian, Clintonian, Delboyian...

And in a single bound, free. Well, not quite, but Alex Salmond certainly cleared some much-needed waddle-room for himself at this afternoon's First Minister's Questions, in great part because of the ineptness of his sapskulled interrogators. After a bruising week of often Jesuitical evasions from the Scottish Government, skeptical hacks perched like rooks in the Holyrood rafters, ready to pick over Salmond's carcass, the stage was meant to be set for an uncomfortable encounter for the First Minister.  

Hitherto, there's been something of Schrödinger's cat about Salmond's account of himself. The condensed version of his Holyrood statement was essentially "The concept of legal advice obviously includes and excludes any advice about law which I may and may not have received." The justification has been full of doubleness, distinguishing legal advice which he did and did not ask for or possess, and could and could not disclose, distinctions which he claimed were implicit in, but not really made explicit to Andrew Neil in their BBC interview. For most, a bemusing guddle of an answer, which could prompt only boredom and disengagement  - or a significant dollop of mistrust.  Salmond's been stewing in this stuff for days now, despite the defensive sallies he and some of his colleagues have launched on telly and on radio in his defence.

Plenty of choice ingredients, you might well think, for an underemployed leader of the opposition to fork through, selecting the choice cuts to serve up to Salmond this afternoon. Lamont, conspicuously absent from the EU advice controversy so far, was spotted practising on a tumshie with her mashie niblick on top of Arthur's Seat this morning. Davidson's neighbours report she's been pummelling an aubergine-shaped punch-bag in a double-breasted suit into the wee small hours over in Partick. Wee Willie Rennie, ill-luck dogging him, is still recovering from last night's BBC Newsnicht and wasn't allotted a question today. At the very least, he no doubt rehearsed enthusiastically braying and pooh-poohing dubiously, as Salmond was taken seriously to task in the chamber. 

None of that materialised. Instead, both Lamont and Davidson were abject, feeble, unfunny, unfocussed. Instead of dragging him across the coals as anticipated, they bungled on content and style, Davidson more ridiculously. They might as well have put him up in a yielding leather armchair beside a nice cosy fire instead. 

I've been pondering how they were able to cock it up so merrily. Poor advice? Bare incompetence? For at least two days, both leaders were in a position to prophesy more or less what Salmond's defence would be. It should have surprised neither of them that he resorted to his nifty device - the independent panel on the ministerial code - to try to douse the controversy. Neither were the lines of justification which he offered novel, or a radical departure from earlier accounts of himself, and the import of his words and actions. They could also rely on Salmond resorting to the old debater's techniques of quibbling with definitions, deflecting from the main thrust of questions by pouncing on perceived errors in their construction.  

Accordingly, it seemed obvious that they'd need to be on top of the precise contents of the Ministerial Code, if they were to stand a hope in hell of catching him out.  Instead, neither politician seemed to have done their homework. Save, that is, for drafting and reading out their prepared remarks, with greater and lesser degrees of dudgeon.  Ruth's approach might be summarised as: "this is an important, serious matter. Now for a series of jocular interludes". It helps if the jokes are witty, and preferably, didn't involve the (more or less) vital, youthful Tory party leader referencing television programmes which were finally discontinued over a decade ago, its glory days already long behind it.  It seems a waste to squander youth's bounty, for the sake of a flaccid gag.

Looking back over past showings, it seems to me that Johann and her advisers are unable to keep critical focus.  At all. Instead of more forensic, detailed dismantling of the First Minister on specific policies, specific failings, setting up tripwires for him to blunder over on themes of wider resonance, she feels much more comfortable delivering acid perorations and pre-chewed put-downs. At length. Accordingly, every week, she skimps on the analysis, and rushes to denunciation, almost in a single breath.  Very rarely do you see her dangling a hook in the water, waiting for Salmond to take the bait, then goggling wetly as the hook finds his throat. 

Instead, Lamont tends to posit an SNP scandal or failure up front - take it for read - and then crack on with Salmond bashing. As a result, we almost never see Alex wriggling uncomfortably, dangling on the line, forced into an awkward admission.  Lamont is simply too predictable, and always furnishes him with some partisan ball to bat back her way from the very get go. She has no lightness on her feet whatsoever as a debater, but being so mechanically pre-scripted, she really should resist the urge to talk so much. Today's little failure in Holyrood was an object lesson in these vices. I'm sure the First Minister appreciates the assistance at this difficult time.  

What might the Tory and Labour leaders have said instead?  Their questioning could go down at least two distinct lines.  I suppose the first is more attractive if you are focussed on Nationalist defeat in Holyrood, the second if you are most concerned with discrediting nationalism more generally in the referendum.  The first, favoured by Labour, was anticipated by Paul Martin's characterisation of the First Minister as a "barefaced liar".  On this line of questioning, the EU topic is of peripheral consequence: the goal is to paint Salmond as a duplicitous scoundrel, a chancer, who habitually lies to journalists, fibs to parliament, and litigates to cover up his falsehoods. It's classic ad hominem stuff, an attempt to dent the personal credibility of the leader, and its effectiveness relies on building up a miasma of mistrust and mislike around the man.

Instead, you might take another approach - one that backgrounds the issue of falsehood, misspeaking, distortion - and instead focusses precisely on the issue of Nationalist credibility on the EU. For my money, while the media and parliamentarians might find the "liar" angle most interesting, it is this second line of questioning which strikes me as more potentially damaging for nationalists, though neither Davidson or Lamont came close to nailing the case.  It might go something like this:

"First Minister. You've been a nationalist for over thirty years. You've been First Minister for six. In that time, your government has brought two referendum bills before this parliament to separate Scotland from the UK.  We now discover that in all those years, it never once - never once - occurred to you to ask your law officers for their opinion on Scotland's EU status after secession. You seem remarkably incurious about this vital question. Scotland's people need an informed debate about independence.  How can the ordinary citizen hope to understand the choices before us, when First Minister's own best notion of the legal possibilities and challenges facing his policy are apparently borrowed from newspaper cuttings from the 1990s, and selective quotes from academic journals? This isn't what a serious, credible nationalist case for independence within the EU looks like."

In the event, both Ruth and Johann wanted to pluck on both strings, but managed to produce two dud notes, rather than one clear one.