Old Habits

This may be a record. The first full week of the Holyrood campaign has whizzed by, and already - already - Scottish Labour figures are making headlines by briefing the press against their leader.

In the Sunday Times this morning, under the legend, "Labour at war as Dugdale gaffes," ubiquitous and available "senior figures" in the party are quoted. Their verdict on Kezia Dugdale's week isn't terrifically healthy. She is, they suggest, "badly damaged" as the result of her muddled comments on how she might vote in a future independence referendum. One even described it as her "Subway moment", recalling the moment when Iain Gray sought refuge behind a meatball marinara, waylaid by Sean Clerkin in Glasgow Central Station in 2011. 

Now, Dugdale has not had her troubles to seek this week. There has been indiscipline. There have been mispitches. But surely there are enough folk like me in the firmament to point this out, without her comrades gleefully piling in, breathing unholy life back into a bad news story which would otherwise be on its last legs. The killer quotations:

“This is an almighty clusterf**k,” said one senior Labour source. “It just plays into the Tory line that they are the true defenders of the Union, even though that’s not true because it’s the Tories who introduced English votes for English laws and caused the EU referendum. Kez should have been landing blows on them, not on the Scottish Labour party.” 

One said Dugdale had “handed a massive gift to the Tory party” at a time when they were under pressure as a result of a backlash against the chancellor’s budget. “Kez has again let them off the hook.” 

Another said it was Dugdale’s “Subway” moment — a reference to the defining moment of Labour’s ill-fated 2011 Holyrood campaign when its leader Iain Gray sought refuge in a sandwich shop after his election campaign launch was hijacked by a protester.

As a hardened partisan, and no friend of the party, I suppose I ought to meet news of this utterly gratuitous infighting with an evil chortle. But Scottish Labour's capacity for indiscreet and poisonous internal briefing remains a thing of wonder and horror to me. Even electoral calamity - apparently - can't wean the party off its old habits of backbiting and internecine conflict.

After disaster has engulfed the party in Westminster, as it fights for its life in Scotland, as its untried leader faces a little turbulence along the way, as all election campaigns must -- you decide to spill the beans to the press, well knowing that an article of this kind is the only logical outcome? Jeezo. You wonder which bored and embittered former MP might be responsible. "If we must lose, let's lose in the most internally divisive and publicly exposed way possible." Just a little lick of the cloak and the dagger, for old time's sake.

Their analysis may be perfectly sound, but quite what they imagine they're achieving is beyond me. Snark of this kind provides a little entertainment for folk like me on a wet Sunday morning. It adds to the gaiety of the nation. But if these "senior sources" are true friends of the Scottish Labour Party, their shadowy, counter-productive interventions are - fundamentally - crackers.