First Minister felt compelled to attend a meeting of the British-Irish Council in Lancashire rather than her own Question Time at Holyrood
Nicola Sturgeon was far too busy attending to international matters of state to get on with her day job on Thursday. After all, following an exhausting couple of days hobnobbing with world leaders, always assuming she met any at Cop27 at Sharm el-Sheikh, doesn’t really prepare one for the mince and tatties agenda at the Scottish Parliament, now does it?
Climate conferences are what she likes, possibly because there’s nothing she can really do as the head of a devolved government to help keep things cool. That makes life much easier, doesn’t it, than dealing with difficult stuff such as Scotland’s ever-lengthening NHS queues.
There’s not much she can do either about sorting out the Northern Irish Protocol dispute and getting the warring parties talking to each other and agreeing to form a government in the province. All the more reason, then, for La Sturgeon to be driven down to that other well-known seaside resort – in this case Blackpool – to mingle with the great and good, if not of the world, then at least of every part of the British Isles.
And so it was to a meeting of the British-Irish Council in Lancashire that Ms Sturgeon felt compelled to attend on Thursday rather than her own Question Time at Holyrood.