They always said there’d be days like this. Having sat through many dismal non-events in the press gallery of the Scottish parliament, it was a relief to see the Scottish parliament rising magnificently to the occasion. The speeches congratulating Alex Salmond’s on his elective coronation were witty, elegant and thoughtful, without a trace of petty party politicking. And I’m not excluding the defeated Labour leader, Iain Gray’s effort, which many observers in the press gallery said was his best ever parliamentary speech.
Gray congratulated Alex Salmond on his election landslide which he said marked another stage in “the coming of age of the Scottish parliament”. That was a pretty remarkable thing for a defeated opposition leader to say, but it seemed to reflect the mood of the chamber, and not just among the massed ranks of Scottish National Party MSPs, who seem to have squeezed all others to the margins. Everyone in the Holyrood debating chamber yesterday could feel “the hand of history” as Tony Blair once put it, on their collective shoulder. Everything has changed, as a result the May landslide, though no one is quite sure in what way, not least the SNP, who are still trying to work out what independence actually means in practice.
