From imprisoned Trotskyite, Tommy Sheridan, to the Sun newspaper. From bisexual hollywood star, Alan Cumming, to David Murray of Rangers Football Club. The Alex Salmond supporters club continues to throw up ever more bizarre alliances. None of it means anything of course since celebrity endorsements can be counterproductive. They antagonise as many people as they energise - unless you are Sir Sean Connery, of course, who is more national monument than celebrity.
What does mean something is momentum, impetus, drive - that sense of being in command of events which is Alex Salmond’s stock in trade. No one wants to be linked right now to the Labour leader Iain Gray - who attempted to relaunch his faltering campaign yesterday - because he just doesn’t have it. It’s not even clear that many Labour politicians want to be associated with Mr Gray right now, following reports that prominent frontbenchers like Andy Kerr and Jackie Baillie are fighting for their seats in the face of the SNP’s astonishing opinion poll advance.
For his part, the UK Labour leader, Ed Miliband, seems to have decided not to poke his nose into the campaign - if you'll excuse the pun. The former Chancellor, Alastair Darling, was sighted a couple of weeks ago, but there have been remarkably few high profile Labour poiticians on the stump. Apart from Gordon Brown - and that is one celebrity endorsement that Iain Gray could have done without right now. Westminster Labour figures, like Ian Davidson, Douglas Alexander et al, appear to have been called on to take a low profiile in the Holyrood campaign so far for reasons that are not obvious.
There have been consistent complaints from Labour MPs that they have either not been asked or have been positively discouraged from taking part in the great battle against the Nats. Now, presumably this is because Iain Gray is wanting to show that he is his own man, leading a distinctly Scottish Labour Party, and that the days when Scottish leaders took instruction from "London Labour" are gone. Certainly, the Scottish Labour manifesto is not one that you could have imagined any UK leader of recent times endorsing, with its rejection of university tuition fees and its promise to create a quarter of a million jobs. But it seems odd that, when the main plank of Labour's Scottish campaign is that "The Tories are back", and that only Labour can stop the Condem cuts, that the MPs on Labour's Westminster front line have not been prominent in the campaign.
Of course, things have deteriorated so far in the Scottish Labour campaign that Iain Gray is now attacked almost whatever he does. If he called for a raft of Labour MPs to come and help, he would be accused of making a desperate and undignified bid to get Westminster to save him from Salmond. If he hadn't tried to raise the stakes on independence this week in his "relaunch" speech - which he was going to make anyway - he'd have been accused of ignoring Alex Salmond's number one policy weakness.
One long-standing but alienated former Labour activist put it to me yesterday that he was beginning to feel really sorry for Iain Gray. Perhaps that's the way forward. A celebrity campaign of sympathy endorsements along the lines of "I'm not voting Labour, but I do feel sorry for Iain". Come on people. It's time to Save the Gray
There have been consistent complaints from Labour MPs that they have either not been asked or have been positively discouraged from taking part in the great battle against the Nats. Now, presumably this is because Iain Gray is wanting to show that he is his own man, leading a distinctly Scottish Labour Party, and that the days when Scottish leaders took instruction from "London Labour" are gone. Certainly, the Scottish Labour manifesto is not one that you could have imagined any UK leader of recent times endorsing, with its rejection of university tuition fees and its promise to create a quarter of a million jobs. But it seems odd that, when the main plank of Labour's Scottish campaign is that "The Tories are back", and that only Labour can stop the Condem cuts, that the MPs on Labour's Westminster front line have not been prominent in the campaign.
Of course, things have deteriorated so far in the Scottish Labour campaign that Iain Gray is now attacked almost whatever he does. If he called for a raft of Labour MPs to come and help, he would be accused of making a desperate and undignified bid to get Westminster to save him from Salmond. If he hadn't tried to raise the stakes on independence this week in his "relaunch" speech - which he was going to make anyway - he'd have been accused of ignoring Alex Salmond's number one policy weakness.
One long-standing but alienated former Labour activist put it to me yesterday that he was beginning to feel really sorry for Iain Gray. Perhaps that's the way forward. A celebrity campaign of sympathy endorsements along the lines of "I'm not voting Labour, but I do feel sorry for Iain". Come on people. It's time to Save the Gray
