For our money – and by an admittely wafer-thin margin over the likes of Annie Wells, Miles Briggs, Alex Cole-Hamilton and James Kelly – Tory list MSP Jamie Greene is still the lowest-watt bulb in the Scottish Parliament’s festival of lights.
(Our alerter readers may have spotted that that’s an official watermarked Scottish Conservatives pic, so that’s them making him look as intelligent as they can.)
But being really properly brainless isn’t just a matter of not knowing which powers are devolved before you attack the Scottish Government for your own UK administration’s failings or not being able to do basic arithmetic.
To stand out as especially doltish in a group of epic dolts like the current Tory cohort in Holyrood, you also need to be incapable of following simple logical trains of thought. So let’s see if we can illustrate with a topical example.
Last night it was announced that snagging works on the Queensferry Crossing will take a few months longer than originally planned, resulting in occasional night-time lane closures, all of them at times when traffic is light and one lane each way will be plenty. Greene, though, was quick to pipe up with an outraged quote:
Let’s just break that comment down. He’s complaining that the bridge was opened “prematurely”. That can only mean he thinks it shouldn’t have been opened until every last nut and bolt was polished and painted to perfection, which we now know means next summer, two years after the actual opening.
What would have happened in the meantime? Drivers would have had to continue to use the existing road bridge, which would have meant not only considerably more congestion (since it would have had to carry the traffic currently spread between two bridges) but also considerably more frequent TOTAL closures – not just off-peak lane reductions – because the existing road bridge has no wind shielding.
In the last month alone, Storm Ali saw the original road bridge completely closed for large parts of two full days, and restricted the rest of the time, while the Queensferry Crossing continued almost unaffected.
So if Jamie Greene was in charge of transport in Scotland – and remember he’s the man the Tories say would be the Transport Minister if they were the Scottish Government – then he’d have kept it closed unnecessarily for two full years and condemned commuters to vast amounts of disruption and delay for all that time, just in order to avoid the NO disruption and delay that will be caused by the snagging work.
To be that dim is one thing. To so regularly and willingly parade that dimness in front of the electorate is the mark of a special talent, and – unlike Jamie Greene – we’re sure you all know which usage of the word “special” that is.
