Humza Yousaf - A Two-Faced, Stone-Cold Liar? (March 04, 2023)

As Judge Judy is fond of saying - 'if it doesn't make sense, it's almost certainly not true' - and this applies to Humza Yousaf's baloney reason for missing a crucial vote in the Scottish Parliament on same sex marriage. 

Yousaf set up a meeting with the Pakistan Consul General in Glasgow for 4 February 2014 - on the same day and presumably the same time as the parliamentary vote in Edinburgh.

Yousaf set up this meeting on 16 January 2014 - two days after being advised of the 4 February date for the same sex marriage vote.

The clash was perfectly avoidable - another date and time could have been arranged, or the meeting could have easily taken place in Edinburgh, for example.

Scottish Ministers have staff to manage their diaries, of course, so Yousaf's hastily arranged meeting was clearly to act as cover for his absence, as the SNP's Alex Neil has claimed.

You can just imagine what Nicola Sturgeon would have said if Boris Johnson had concocted such a lame story.

The tawdry affair is laid bare in an excellent report by Tom Gordon in The Herald and it's well nigh impossible not to come to the conclusion that Humza Yousaf is a two-faced, stone-cold liar. 

   

Humza 'Pants On Fire' Yousaf (March 03, 2023)

SNP ministers are all bound by the Nolan principles and its seven key standards in public life - which include honesty and integrity, of course.

Yet here we have the remarkable sight of Humza Yousaf calling former SNP cabinet colleagues liars over claims that he asked to be 'skipped' for an important vote on same sex marriage.

The record shows the meeting was put in Yousaf's ministerial diary well after the date for a vote had been set and Alex Neil was the SNP minister who drove the bill through the Scottish Parliament.

Maybe the way out of this mess is for Humza Yousaf to agree to refer himself to the Independent Advisers on Scotland's Ministerial Code, if he wins the SNP leadership contest.

Because it's clearly impossible for both Alex Neil and Humza Yousaf to be telling the truth - and there are other senior political figures backing up what Alex Neil has to say.