I have to say that Michael Matheson finally did something right when he realised his number was up over the appalling iPad scandal.
But the inexcusable thing about his ducking and diving marathon, which began after being caught out, was that he took so long to quit.
If we’d been hanging on at the other end of a mobile phone line waiting for him to make his mind up, the costs might have dwarfed his £11,000 bill for roaming-charges mayhem in Morocco.
It was hardly an admirable or honourable decision by Matheson to end his career as health secretary after making many of us sick to the back teeth of him. He had exhausted our patience, so it was not a spontaneous voluntary act of moral conscience, so to speak.
On the contrary, it appears that if he’d been able to get away with it, he would have simply carried on brazenly – comfortable in the knowledge that his guilty secret was safe, with all the privileged trappings of power paid for by the public he was trying to hoodwink.
I think many of us suspect that we still haven’t got to the bottom of Matheson’s sorry tale, which began on a family holiday. We are relying on an official investigation into the affair to do this.
Fully transparent, not semi-opaque, please
I hope we are presented with a “transparent” report – a much-abused word I use with trepidation. Transparency is a concept the Scottish Government has struggled to embrace, which is a charitable way of describing it.
A laid-bare account detailing the precise breakdown of Matheson’s iPad bill – and subsequent dealings with his boss Humza Yousaf and civil servants – is the least the public deserve. Not a fudge full of blacked-out redacted sections, leaving us with a worthless, semi-opaque revelation.
It has become a matter of principle. Apart from the dishonesty or gullibility of those involved, there are ramifications over how the former health secretary was able to bluff his way past subservient civil servants during initial investigations into the extraordinary data roaming charges on his parliamentary account. And further fallout from the first minister’s actions, for that matter.
Does the system require tightening to ensure that what looks like a feeble checking process becomes more rigorous? Even to the extent of referring such potential ministerial misconduct breaches to external auditors or lawyers, especially if the system and political characters running it are flawed?
There is an accompanying perception that Scottish Government ministers are untouchable and immune. Just look at the way Matheson wore out his fingernails clinging on for months when, in all probability, he would have been dismissed on the spot in a properly run business.
Humza Yousaf’s role in Matheson scandal is troubling
First Minister Yousaf’s embarrassing role in this farce could actually fill the pages of another report. Like two schoolboys in the vicinity of a suspicious bag of marbles, Matheson concocted a flimsy alibi for himself, and his protector Yousaf was rather too quick to absolve him of wrongdoing.
Yousaf looked weak and indecisive in allowing his mortally-wounded ally to stumble on during an official investigation by the Scottish parliament’s corporate body; the FM pronounced it was “due process“. What was the point of delaying the inevitable, other than political stonewalling?
A leader of any organisation worth their salt would have thoroughly checked out this clearly suspicious iPad episode for themselves. No matter how highly they viewed Matheson’s past “integrity”, as Yousaf put it.
Instant dismissal for gross misconduct also means no pay in lieu of notice for ordinary workers; many might gulp at Matheson’s reported £13,000 pay-off
Summary dismissal is a valid option in employment law, when trust and honesty has broken down dramatically with an employee, and all the facts and admissions of culpability by the guilty party have been ascertained. Due process, you might call it.
But not the first option in the grubby world of politics, when trust has become a massive issue for the government in power.
Instant dismissal for gross misconduct also means no pay in lieu of notice for ordinary workers; many might gulp at Matheson’s reported £13,000 pay-off. It’s normal now for people in power to hang onto something they don’t deserve after destroying public trust.
Arrogance of power means history keeps repeating
Matheson’s problems with distinguishing right from wrong encapsulate the fundamental irony of power begetting weakness. The arrogance of power means history keeps repeating itself.
There will be those who accuse me of being anti-SNP and, therefore, “running Scotland down”, but the government of the day – of whatever colour – must be challenged at every turn, or it decays and rots from within.
The irony here is that the Scottish Government’s defenders now routinely point to the Westminster Tories as having done just the same. Tories and SNP in the same boat, as bad as each other; so, that’s OK, then?
It reminds me again of Orwell’s Animal Farm. The moral of the classic story is that the masses escaped their bad masters only to discover, with horror, that the new ones were just the same.
David Knight is the long-serving former deputy editor of The Press and Journal
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