The National:

“I JUST don’t understand what’s going on with the Scots.” That line could have been spoken by just about anyone who appears on GB News.

But it actually came from Daily Mail writer Emily Hill, during a recent appearance on the channel in which she bemoaned the popularity of Nicola Sturgeon.

Host Mark Dolan had opened by saying he remembered the days when there were Labour voters, LibDem voters, SNP voters “and we all just came along, and when there was an election you just accepted the result, what’s changed?”

Hill, whose website states she was sacked from the Sunday Times, apparently saw that question as an opportunity to take a pop at the First Minister.

“I have absolutely no idea,” she opened. She should have stopped there too.

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Instead, Hill went on: “The popularity of Nicola Sturgeon really baffles me … Nicola Sturgeon, I wrote a Mail+ column about this actually, I find it absolutely baffling that Scots are so behind her, which apparently they seem to be, they say this in all the opinion polls.”

She then claims, with a straight face, that “Remainers in London just love the idea that she wants to force the whole of Scotland to be in masks forever”.

“I just don’t understand what’s going on with the Scots. Why do they like this woman?” Hill closes, bringing a welcome end to what National columnist Gerry Hassan called "one and a half mins of fact free discussion on Scotland".

It would seem that the article she is referring to was published on February 11 under the headline: “How ironic that the nation of Braveheart has a leader obsessed with keeping its people under needless restrictions.”

Catchy.

We’ll save you the torturous task of reading the thing, to say it contains wisdom such as:

  • "[Scotland was] made so famous by the declaration in Braveheart that ‘they may take our lives, but they will never take our freedom’”. Yes, she actually says that Mel Gibson speaking that line is what put Scotland on the map.
  • “In England, children weren’t just liberated from masks the second Boris started standing up to the Sage experts, they are educated in heated classrooms.” Hill spectacularly argues that children became free once Boris Johnson began ignoring health experts, and goes on to claim that classrooms in Scotland are much colder than the ones south of the Border.
  • “If Sturgeon had unlimited power over her people, it seems highly likely Scots would be … blockading the M74.” We’re not sure where to start with that one.

She then hits on the crux of the matter: Nicola Sturgeon’s popularity.

Hill writes: “Yet the impression we are given is that [Sturgeon] is so much more popular than Boris Johnson. Only the results of the latest Mail+ poll give me cause to suspect otherwise...”

So her evidence for the claim that Nicola Sturgeon isn’t as popular as all the hard evidence suggests is a poll of readers of the Daily Mail. No issues with that then …