The peculiar Holyrood jousting style of Douglas Ross

It passes most Scots by, but a mythic battle for the ages is played out each week at Holyrood.

It’s not good vs evil – that’s far too mundane – but there are shades of legend about this seemingly eternal struggle.  

Picture, if you will, a sentient stone giant – steadfast, resolute, honourable… but perhaps a bit ponderous… beset by a wily mosquito of suspiciously grey morals.

Yes, it’s the weekly clash between Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross and First Minister John Swinney, where the SNP leader bats off attacks of nibbling severity specifically designed to get under his skin and draw blood.

Here’s how it goes. Douglas Ross gets four questions, but really asks only one or two by deploying the tactic of variations on a theme.  

He starts with a slow tempo, usually a straightforward query, which Mr Swinney will dolefully reply to.

But it’s a ‘gotcha’ moment – Mr Ross really meant to ask a more probing question on SNP policy, which exposes the SNP’s ineptitude, and, voice rising, he does so.

Mr Swinney, who falls for it every time, starts to get tetchy and doesn’t answer this directly, giving Douglas Ross his opening.

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Reaching fever pitch for his last two goes, firing on all cylinders, Ross accuses John Swinney of failing to answer one, simple, little question – clear evidence he’s unfit for the job – and demands to know why the Scottish Government is failing in whatever area he’s focusing on this week.

His backbenchers will take these exchanges as their cue to get increasingly rowdy, sparking regular interventions from Alison Johnstone, the Presiding Officer.  

(Though like a schoolteacher whose bark is worse than her bite, her threats and calls for decorum are chiefly ignored from week-to-week).

If it’s been a good week for Ross, and therefore a bad one for Swinney, the First Minister will get red in the face, taciturn demeanor gone, and roar back at them for the discourtesy of chuntering from the sidelines while it’s his turn to speak.

But he always finally cracks, and thunders down from his pulpit about the iniquities of the former Tory government, their lack of funding and the subsequent shortfalls for Scotland, and for his final rejoinder, he’ll get historical.

It’s a matter of record that Douglas Ross backed Liz Truss’s economic policies, and urged the Scottish Government to do likewise.  

It’s also a matter of record that those policies were a disaster, with severe implications for the UK economy and household budgets.  

John Swinney will never, ever, let Douglas Ross forget he backed a Prime Minister who lasted less time in office than the shelf-life of a lettuce.

And so it was this week, with Mr Ross raising a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on the SNP’s skills strategy for young people, highlighting the parts that found it wanting.

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Going on to reference the SNP’s Young Person’s Guarantee, he suggested it has guaranteed nothing more than a bleak future for tens of thousands of 16-24 year olds with more than 52,700 of them currently economically inactive – not in employment, education or training.

This is the highest figure on record and equal to one-in-ten of their cohort across Scotland. How could the Scottish Government have allowed this to happen? And why doesn’t John Swinney know the exact number (which, indeed, he did not). 

Mr Ross then turned to a report from Audit Scotland on the country’s colleges sector for his final sally, which found that without funding students will suffer as courses are cut and staff levels reduced.  

What now, for Scotland’s young people?

After going on at length in his previous replies about the Scottish Government’s record on supporting young people, the policies and programmes put in place to help them, and the work behind the scenes, John Swinney’s ire was finally engaged: “The problem that Douglas Ross has got,” he declaimed, “is that he perpetually comes along to this parliament asking me to spend more money.

“Mr Ross asked me last week to spend more money on free school meals, to spend more money on peak rail fares, and today he wants me to spend more money on colleges at the same time as he wants me to reduce tax and take £1.5bn out of the public finances – and support the Liz Truss economic madness which has inflicted misery on our country.  

“I’m going to listen to nothing Douglas Ross says to me in his remaining couple of weeks because his record is one of absolute abject economic failure.”

Mr Ross never fails to get a rise out of the First Minister, but his time to bedevil him at FMQs is growing short.

Next week will be his last time firing off at the weekly grilling, before he steps down as Tory leader. Time will tell if his successor is as good as disrupting Swinney’s equilibrium.