WITH advancing age comes retirement, and the ability to sample daytime TV as often as wanted. Having long since resolved to not watch the regular antics of an assortment of moaning Unionist MSPs, Scottish Parliament TV is something I have not viewed for some time.

However, given the prospect of the long-awaited attendance of Scotland’s so-called top civil servant at the Holyrood inquiry, I decided to tune in and hear what had led the Scottish Government’s civil service to contest and then abandon a legal case involving the former First Minister, Alex Salmond.

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Ms Evans (salary more than £165,000) apologised for the “procedural failure” and went on at length to justify the bungled investigations which eventually led to the judicial review which has cost the taxpayers of Scotland more than £500,000.

Sometime shortly after that I lost interest in the event, as a number of obvious questions were asked and obvious answers provided. The attraction of switching on the washing machine proved too much and I abandoned the TV in despair.

Putting aside the rights and wrongs of carrying out the actual investigation into these allegations from some time ago, I doubt that there is any chief executive of any company in the land (UK or Scotland) who would still be in post after having just lost half a million pounds of the company’s cash.

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I had hoped the inquiry would be held over a number of consecutive days – perhaps lasting, at the very worst, a couple of weeks – but it seems we are to be faced with this dragging on one day a week for several months. In addition some of the important people and important papers will not actually form part of the investigation.

The prospect of a long drawn-out, depressing inquiry, which it appears will now focus on who said what to who, and when they said it, will do very little to enhance the reputation of the Scottish Government or Ms Evans.

I don’t think I will be watching any more of it.

John Baird
Paisley