Scots minister downer of a speech

Magnus Linklater:

There are those who rise to a great occasion and there are those who drag it down with them. The Scottish Justice Secretary, for whom natural eloquence is as elusive as a ray of sunshine in a Scottish summer, falls firmly into the latter camp.

It would be inopportune — a word he favours — to reach for a cricketing analogy in Ashes week, but he is the Geoffrey Boycott of the Scottish parliament, a stonewaller of the old school. His statement on what might have been a parliamentary day to remember was a steady plod through all the things that he had already said, but with slightly longer pauses.

He has adopted, for the gravity of the Lockerbie affair, a style which I guess he may think is Churchillian. It reminded me of a thousand sermons I have heard in Presbyterian churches and I wondered whether he had ever aspired to the cloth.

This impression was emphasised when he said: “Al-Megrahi now faces a sentence imposed by a higher power. It is one that no court, in any jurisdiction, in any land, could revoke or overrule. It is terminal, final and irrevocable. He is going to die.”

At that point my theological parallel was brushed aside by the realisation that this was straight out of the Monty Python dead parrot sketch. Except of course that al-Megrahi has yet to fall off his perch.

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We all face an eventual death sentence from God, but most of us don't murder a plane load of innocent people. While al-Megrahi has not fallen from his perch, certainly the Scottish Justice Minister has.