The Rev's in a Stew: astounding scenes on X, formerly known as Twitter, as Somerset's favourite clergyman *does his nut*

My faithful Somerset stalker, such a thrillingly foul-mouthed man of God, always assures his dwindling band of readers that he can't possibly be stalking me because he only tweets about me twice a year.  But even if he hadn't already long since vastly exceeded his quota of two tweets for 2025, he'd have done it more than twice over today alone with at least five characteristically well-adjusted tweets, in which among other things he calls me a "pathetically cowardly little weasel".

The main purpose of his rant was, remarkably, to out himself as one of this blog's much-loved gang of anonymous trolls who I have to clear up after on a daily basis, and to share some obsessively-collected screenshots of the troll posts that I later deleted (very un-stalker-like behaviour on his part, I'm sure we can all agree).  This will not be a major surprise to a number of the regulars here who have long suspected that they can see the "Stew Style" in some of the Anon comments.  There was one lengthy comment in particular a few days ago that someone thought was Stew, and if it was indeed him, the remarkable thing is that he appeared to be completely unaware that Panelbase (a firm that both he and I commissioned polls from on many occasions) has rebranded as Norstat.

Stew is a man after the heart of the "Crossmaglen Columbo", because he clearly wants to believe that his comment in the early hours of this morning was some sort of ingenious "Gotcha" that was only deleted because there was no possible answer to it - as opposed to, y'know, because it was merely one of the dozens of anonymous troll comments I receive on an average day, and if I tried to answer them all I'd never get around to eating dinner or getting my shopping done.  But just this once I'll humour the blessed West Country cleric and answer the comment that seems to be particularly close to his heart.

Basically he was responding to a post in which I pointed out the contradiction between his claim in December that there was "zero chance" of the pro-indy Holyrood majority being retained in the 2026 election, and his claim two days ago that the SNP are well on course for five more years in power. He tried to pray in aid a point of pedantry by saying that it's possible for the SNP to stay in power while losing the pro-indy majority. But as I pointed out to a rather more civil commenter who made an identical point a few hours later, Stew has already conceded in a blogpost a few months ago that there is a real chance of the pro-independence majority being retained, so it's rather puzzling that he appears to be reverting to trying to hold the line on a claim that he's long since repudiated.

But let's humour him and assume hypothetically that he really is trying to thread the needle and claim that he knows with a high level of confidence that the 2026 election will definitely fall within the relatively narrow band of possible results in which the SNP retain power but without a pro-indy majority.  There's an obvious logical problem with that, because he specifically says that the reason for his belief that the SNP will retain power is the current state of play in the opinion polls, and yet the vast majority of those polls suggest the SNP and Greens between them are on course to retain the pro-indy majority.  So he'd have to be saying that the opinion polls are right that the SNP are in the lead, but wrong about the scale of that lead.  Is he saying that?  If so, why is he saying that?  I'm not sure he even knows himself.

Indeed, the polls would have to be overestimating the SNP lead by a truly spectacular degree, because for Stew to maintain that there is "zero chance" of a pro-indy majority, the SNP and Greens would have to currently be nowhere near even striking distance of a majority.  That clearly is not the reality of the situation, unless the polls are systemically wrong - and if you believe the polls are systemically wrong, why would you be so confident the SNP are in the lead?  It just doesn't make sense, Stew, and you know it doesn't make sense.

He finishes his rant with the following:

"However much you know you should ignore him, it really is hard not to laugh at someone whose debating skills are as hysterically brittle as this."

Hmmm.  Are you quite sure that's the hill you want to die on, Stew?  After all, you're the chap who boasts about your instablock policy for anyone who disagrees with you on Twitter.  You first blocked me in 2016 because you couldn't cope with me pointing out that the standard 3% margin of error in individual opinion polls doesn't apply to long-term polling averages - a point that even your devoted fan Rolfe (Morag Kerr) picked you up on too.

And you're also the chap who was so unable to cope with a single short comment from Douglas Clark on this blog that instead of responding to it, you got your solicitor David Halliday to send me menacing messages at the dead of night with all sorts of implied threats about what would happen if I didn't delete it.  Anyone would think you didn't have a credible defence to Douglas' claim that you disgracefully blamed the Hillsborough victims for the 1989 disaster.

No, I'm afraid no-one can even hold a candle to you on the "hysterically brittle" stakes, Stew.