Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Embattled Carmichael wins rare landslide victory - as you vote him the worst Secretary of State for Scotland since 1999

Many thanks to all 558 of you who voted in our poll to choose the worst Secretary of State for Scotland since devolution in 1999. Unsurprisingly, Alistair Carmichael emerged as the runaway winner, in recognition of his admission a few weeks ago that he was responsible for the attempt to smear Nicola Sturgeon during the general election, and that he would have had no choice but to resign from the office of SoS if he had still been occupying it. The real battle was for second place, and for a while it was quite a close run thing between the incumbent David Mundell, and perennial fan favourite "Jackanory" Jim Murphy. It was Mundell who eventually pulled away, perhaps thanks to his shambolic performance during the Scotland Bill debate a few hours ago.

Here are the full results. Multi-voting was enabled, which is why the total number of votes is much higher than the total number of voters. The percentages in brackets represent the proportion of voters who selected each 'candidate'.

Who has been the worst Secretary of State for Scotland since devolution?

Alistair Carmichael : 347 (62%)

David Mundell : 210 (37%)

Jim Murphy : 170 (30%)

Helen Liddell : 132 (23%)

John Reid : 116 (20%)

Douglas Alexander : 108 (19%)

Alistair Darling : 104 (18%)

Danny Alexander : 102 (18%)

Des Browne : 67 (12%)

Michael Moore : 58 (10%)


Given that Helen Liddell's tenure as SoS was well over a decade ago, and that she has since vanished from the public eye, it's rather startling to see her in a clear fourth place - evidently her inadequacies have lingered long in the memory. And almost a fifth of you are still traumatised by Danny Alexander's horrific eighteen-day occupation of the Scotland Office in May 2010.

Personally, I think Michael "007" Moore has got off rather lightly here - he was responsible for burying his party's commitment to Home Rule and federalism in the aftermath of the 2010 election, and for slamming the door on the SNP's constructive attempts to beef up the Calman proposals.

2 comments:

  1. " Alistair Carmichael emerged as the runaway winner..."

    Guess you can't keep a duplicitous shyster down. Cream rises to the top once again.

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  2. The thing is, Michael Moore actually comes across as a reasonably nice guy, whereas Helen Liddell comes across as, well, Stalin's Granny.

    ReplyDelete