How I plan to unmask some Conservative anti-vaxxers ...

MONDAY

I’M preparing for my first ever authentic Burns Supper. I’d been to a few of these in London but it was mainly expat Scots from the banking world and assorted Tory grandees claiming some sort of ancient Scottish lineage.

They were dreadful affairs characterised only by the number of whisky-flecked codgers eager to show the very few women at these events that they weren’t wearing anything under their kilts. Hephzibah Bowles-Worthington, my plus-one for these events, always came armed with a large magnifying glass. She would brandish it theatrically whenever one of these wretched old public school brigands insisted on showing her his Hickory Dickory Dock.

This year though, the Young Greens and a few Liberal Democrats have expressed their fury about an event that they claim celebrates misogyny and encourages gender stereotypes.

They insist that Tam O’Shanter is cultural defamation. They say they’ve uncovered research showing that the witches dancing their diabolical reels in Alloway Kirk were actually a very early depiction of non-binary people and that Burns’s poem demonised them both literally and metaphorically.

A compromise is reached by commissioning an updated version of Tam O’Shanter to be written by a panel of gender academics from Edinburgh University. In this, the Devil is portrayed merely as a rather excitable wood sprite of no identifiable gender whatsoever.

Just as importantly, Mrs O’Shanter is given a more prominent role in the proceedings.

TUESDAY

SINCE my conversion to the Nationalist cause, following the discovery that half the Johnson cabinet are actually devil-worshippers, my edgy encounters with “H” the Unionist spymaster at the heart of the Scottish Government now place me in a terrifying dilemma. Do I tell Nicola that one of her cabinet secretaries is actually a Unionist plant, or do I play along with the charade for the purposes of obtaining information that could be used to our advantage?

I’m due to meet “H” on Friday at our usual rendezvous point in the lowest floor of the New Street car park at Waverley Station.

I’m determined to unmask him and tell him the game is up.

WEDNESDAY

THE unfolding drama in Australia about Novak Djokovic’s visa has given me an idea. I think that Nicola might appreciate it. She’s already taken me into the outer fringes of her inner circle. Occasionally, I get to carry her documents into FMQs along the Humza Yousaf corridor. My mum actually saw me on the television the other week during a three-and-half second segment about Covid restrictions in Scotland on the BBC’s News at Ten.

The following evening while having a late night drink in Fingers Piano Bar I’m actually importuned by a rather admirable young Jean Brodie type who asked me if I’d like to help her with her briefing papers back at her flat. She shot me a most lascivious wink that almost snapped the elastic in my new Kempes and Ayala designer jockey briefs.

My plan is very simple. We target some prominent anti-vaxxers among the English Tory elite and send them fake invitations to a glitzy Burns Supper on the Castle Esplanade under a big tent. We offer to fly them up and billet them at the Balmoral free of charge.

Then we simply hold them in detention hotels for not having the proper vaccine exemptions while claiming no knowledge of the bogus invitations. We put the reckless chancers on public display at a press conference before deporting them back over the border with a warning never to darken Scotland’s door again – unless they make a full public apology and promise to get their jabs under close supervision of a Scottish trained doctor.

Jason Leitch is visibly rattling with glee at the idea. But the much more reserved and elegant Linda Bauld is less sure. “We have to persuade the anti-vaxxers by reason,” she tells me in those creamy tones of hers, “not blackmail them into compliance.” What a woman!

THURSDAY

THE FM loves my plan and even asks me to carry her red Coco Chanel bag for her into the chamber later that day. We send out the invitations to the mad anti-vaxx and mask-dodging elites and within minutes we get verbal acceptances from all of their secretaries. The game is afoot and a massive pro-independence propaganda coup is about to come to fruition.

FRIDAY

THE moment of truth with “H” has dawned. Who is this tartan pimpernel who’s betrayed his country and the Yes movement from his place of privilege in the Scottish cabinet?