Education secretary moved to new role

IN THE end, Alex Salmond took matters into his own hands, before a no-confidence vote in the Scottish Parliament gave him no other choice, as he dispensed with the services of his education secretary, Fiona Hyslop.

He was putting her out of her misery, in fact, after too many people with an interest in education in Scotland appeared to turn against her.

The final straw probably occurred at the end of last week. Ms Hyslop fired one more desperate shot out of her bunker when she warned local authorities that she would strip them of their educational responsibilities unless they bucked up. It was a dangerous threat to utter. The backlash hastened moves towards a no-confidence vote, which Mr Salmond pre-empted.

It was back to harsh reality after the previous day’s SNP showboating over Scotland’s future and a possible independence referendum.

Mr Salmond is the master of the one-liner, but Labour’s leader, Iain Gray, matched him yesterday by gloating that the first minister had “blinked first” in the standoff over Ms Hyslop’s future.

It was a key moment: the opposition parties are not frightened of flexing their voting muscles, despite Mr Salmond’s previous threats to pull the plug on the administration.

It was hard to lay a glove on the SNP in the early days of the minority administration, but now it has been running things for long enough to be judged properly on matters such as education, health, council budgets and highly-divisive policies such as local income tax and alcohol pricing. The first half of its term was plain sailing, but the second looks a lot rougher.