A direct reply to Shannon Donoghue's threats: You, madam, are an overgrown adolescent bully straight out of "Mean Girls". You have an entitlement complex the size of Mont Blanc. I didn't tolerate your attempts at bullying during meetings of Alba's Constitution Review Group, and if you think your latest infantile threats are going to have a different outcome, you're living on another planet.

When I heard a few hours ago that Shannon Donoghue had once again blown her top about me on social media, I laughed and said "I've got the sacred annual tradition of the Scot Goes Pop April Fool to attend to, so this time Shannon will just have to wait".  But when I actually read her post and realised it contained a very clear threat, I had a change of heart.  I didn't tolerate that kind of nonsense from Stuart Campbell in early 2021 and I certainly have no intention of tolerating it from Shannon now.  So I'll have to dispense with the April Fool - a great pity, because what I had in mind was a cracker, but there's always next year.  

I'm going to start by correcting the factual inaccuracies contained within Shannon's threat.  They don't strike me as being especially important inaccuracies, but when someone is attempting to throw their weight around while making claims that simply aren't true, it's always useful to flag that up.  She claims that she has only ever interacted with me at two committee meetings - not true, there have also been abusive online interactions, and I'm 99% sure I met her at the 2023 Alba conference.  She claims that I am the author of the dozens of parody posts that have appeared under her name (or variants of her name such as "Shhhh Anon") in the comments section of this blog over the last few months.  That is not true either.  I am, however, the author of the "Great Zulfikar Sheikh" parody posts, and in that guise I have sometimes interacted with the person or persons behind Shannon's own parody.  On those occasions I had absolutely no idea who I was really interacting with, and that made it all the more enjoyable.

She claims that the parody comments under her name only appeared because I "approved" them (which oddly contradicts her claim that I wrote them myself).  In reality, I turned off pre-moderation of comments on this blog well over a year ago, and I've kept it off since then except for very brief periods of no more than a few hours at a time when I was trying to give myself a break from dealing with incessant trolling.  So in the vast majority of cases over the last year, comments that appear on the blog have not been pre-approved by me.  I do, of course, have the option of deleting them later, and in the vast majority of cases I have not chosen to do that with the Shannon parody posts, because they are an entirely legitimate form of satire and/or lampooning, they are extremely funny, they are clearly written by an individual (or individuals plural) of considerable talent, and if I had authored them myself I would be downright proud of them.

Let me explain this to you as simply as I can, Shannon.  You, absurd though it may seem to all of us, are a public figure actively engaged in the Scottish political scene.  Like any other public figure, it is entirely legitimate in a free society for anyone to publicly comment on your behaviour or your personality - and that includes satire, parody, mockery or even the most biting of criticisms.  You clearly don't like experiencing any of that - well, tough.  It is not the free society that needs to change or compromise or surrender to suit your fragile sensibilities, it is you who needs to reconcile yourself to the rights and privileges of the free society.  The only other alternative is for you to leave the political sphere altogether and to cease to be such a public figure, and frankly in doing so you'd be giving the Alba party the greatest gift it's ever had.

Why do you have the status of a public figure?  Although, as you know, I think Alba will probably lose all of its elected representatives in the near future and will cease to be a party of note, that has yet to happen.  Ash Regan's seat at Holyrood is the slender thread that keeps Alba relevant for the time being.  That means you have just stood for election to the governing body of a political party with parliamentary representation.  Mercifully you were unsuccessful, but even standing as a candidate makes you a public figure subject to healthy public comment, scrutiny and ridicule.  It doesn't end there, of course, because for the last year you have been an elected member of Alba's Constitution Review Group and I believe also its all-powerful Conference Committee.  I'm told that before switching parties, you were an agent for candidates at the 2022 local elections.  Your mother was justifiably accused of nepotism when she took on both you and your brother as employees during her brief time as a Westminster MP.  And after joining Alba you freely made the extraordinary decision to take part in an interview for a far-right podcast.  All of these facts make you a legitimate subject of public discussion.

And nor is your relationship with Chris Cullen, and your forthcoming marriage to him, somehow immune from public comment.  That's partly because you have chosen to bring it into the public domain for your own political benefit, but it's also partly because the relationship has direct relevance to your activities within the Alba party.  You and Mr Cullen made up a full one-quarter of the Constitution Review Group between you.  Many people thought that was thoroughly inappropriate.  I was in two minds about it, but nevertheless I experienced first-hand the way you abused the situation to act as a sort of tag-team with Mr Cullen while making attempts to bully during in-person meetings of the group.  

You complain that I have seen one of your "personal" Instagram posts from September 2024 - which, incidentally, is only seven months ago, not the prehistoric era that you're trying to melodramatically suggest I've been digging into.  The reason I saw it is that a Google search for your name several months ago took me directly to it.  Your desperate attempts to reframe the sort of routine Google search to find out some basic information about who a person is, an activity that practically every person on the planet engages in on a regular basis, as a form of "scary stalking" or "creepy harassment" is imbecilic, it is lamentable, and it is doomed to fail.  As pathetic stunts go, it is all too worthy of you.  Instead of ranting and raving about entirely normal online behaviour, I'd suggest a more constructive use for your time might be to adjust your Instagram privacy settings, which you are clearly deeply unhappy with the results of.  That's your own responsibility to sort out, not mine.

To leave you in no doubt about my response to your infantile foot-stamping demands, no, Shannon, "enough" is NOT "enough".  My "behaviour" will NOT "cease immediately".  Indeed, it will not cease at all.  I will continue to publicly comment on you, and your words, and your actions, if I wish to do so and whenever I see fit.  Given your privileged princess position within the tinpot dictatorship that is the Alba party, it's true that you and others around you had some arbitrary power to curtail my free speech when I was a party member - or more accurately to get me expelled when I refused to accept the inappropriate curtailment of my speech.  But you'll find that out here in the real world, when you give orders your mother will not be able to enforce them for you.  Nobody gives a damn about your petulant demands when you have no right to be making them in the first place.

Now, I'm not suggesting for a moment that being expelled from a political party is a personal setback on a par with losing a job or a romantic relationship breaking up (the latter has happened to me within the last couple of years, and so I know it was a lot worse).  But expulsion is certainly not a minor thing.  I'm not sure that you and the others who were responsible for it have any idea of the sheer extent of the stress and upset that you maliciously caused both to me and to a lesser degree to the people close to me.  It may be a game to you, Shannon, and I can see how it must feel like a really fun game when you know that you can carry on hypocritically breaching the party's Code of Conduct yourself on an almost daily basis, safe in the knowledge that your family ties make you totally immune from disciplinary action.  But I can assure you that it's not a game to me, or to the other people that you and the rest of the gang of bullies have trampled all over whenever you felt like it.  I'm the lucky one - I have a platform with which I was able to set the record straight, so in a sense you didn't get away with it in my case, which is precisely why you're so angry right now.  Most of your other victims must feel totally invisible.

You'd never be able to put right the harm you have caused, which is perhaps just as well because you have no interest in even trying.  You appear to have absolutely no sense of right and wrong.  But having just gone through the events of the last year, I'll be damned if I ever again allow you to interfere with my right to free speech, regardless of the intimidation tactics you employ.  So you can take your latest infantile threats and throw them into the cold, dark Ayrshire sea.  Whether you like it or not, there will be no censorship on this blog of intelligent and witty parody comments about public political figures, and indeed I actively encourage those responsible for the superb Shannon parody to continue posting their comments, in order to vividly demonstrate that your latest attempts at bullying have failed comprehensively, and that all such future attempts will always fail, as they will always richly deserve to.