A tale of Highland holidays – who clyped on Boris?

What to make of the news that the prime minister is said to have cut his Scottish holiday short because of security concerns about its location becoming public?

Apart from the fact that he was holidaying in Scotland, I had no idea where Boris Johnson was hunkered down with his partner and child until the Daily Mail online published a ‘picture exclusive’ on 20 August that included the weasel words:

A public road overlooks the cottage, but the Mail has decided not to reveal its location.

The accompanying photos and details of the property had plenty of evidence to get online sleuths working hard to identify the exact address of the holiday cottage. They weren’t necessarily Scottish nationalists: one who tweeted the precise geographical coordinates of the place just seemed to be an English Boris-hater.

The Mail’s interest may have been piqued by irritation that the usual arrangement for a pool press photographer to take a few generic shots of a holidaying prime ministerial family for general use was ignored this time, presumably on security grounds. I’ll return to this point later.

Something, or someone, must have alerted the Mail to Johnson’s whereabouts. We’ll probably never know who, but there is some circumstantial evidence.

On 17 August, three days before the Mail article, the Daily Record’s Westminster Editor tweeted this apparently innocuous message:

As you can see, by the standards of national journalists, his tweet received only a modest amount of attention, most of it after the Mail article was published. Before the 20th, there was this retweet:

and on the 18th this (‘Writer from Wester Ross … I’m a Scottish Nationalist’):

So before there was any publicity about the precise whereabouts of Johnson’s holiday at least some people in the area were on the case based on what the unknowing might assume was a journalist’s innocuous tweet. Mr Blackford, if you weren’t aware, is the SNP leader at Westminster and MP for the Wester Ross area. The cottage Johnson rented is also in Wester Ross.

In the days after the Mail article Blackford returned to the subject.

He was quoted in a follow up article by the same newspaper on 22 August:

The Scottish National Party’s leader at Westminster, Ian Blackford, has strenuously denied claims that Mr Johnson’s holiday destination was leaked by nationalists. He said: ‘This is completely preposterous and at no point have I referred publicly to the PM’s whereabouts. To be smeared in this way is unacceptable.’

Contrary to many people’s beliefs, politicians rarely tell outright lies. Instead, they find ways to tell the truth with a get out clause. We must take as truth Mr Blackford’s assurance that he did not refer publicly to the prime minister’s whereabouts (although his ‘education at Eton’ tweet certainly came with a heavy nod and a wink). But privately it may be a different matter.

Indeed, it seems the prime minister’s presence was common knowledge:

‘ … so many folk in the Highlands told me they knew where the PM was’. So he did at least know. (By the way, what sort of person goes out of their way to tip off their SNP MP that the prime minister’s holidaying in the area? It’s certainly not a benign act)

Then there was this:

Again, those politician’s words – ‘not informed by number 10’. But possibly informed by the Metropolitan Police, Police Scotland, some other public agency or even a private office.

All this, remember, from a man who was said to have started the #WheresCharlie campaign against the previous incumbent of the same parliamentary seat, Charles Kennedy (SNP’s Ian Blackford accused of disfiguring last months of Charles Kennedy’s life). His SNP branch convener, Brian Smith, had to resign his party position because of his persistent online abuse of Kennedy (we’ll come back to Mr Smith).

Blackford continued to worry at the subject like a dog with a bone for a few days after the 20th, tweeting and retweeting about it a number of times, including this disingenuous message:

This effort gets back to the question of whether there had been no photo opportunity about Johnson’s holiday for the media because of security concerns. When the news of his whereabouts broke there was almost immediate online sniggering from the wilder fringes of nationalism further South about taking a trip North for a day’s outing, no doubt to hold up their manky placards as close to the PM as they could get, perhaps bellowing ‘plague carriers’ at the visitors as they or some of their cohorts did to travellers at the English border not long ago. Worse than that, it’s not difficult to imagine a more serious attempt at an assault on the visitors, if not at their holiday cottage (just off a public road) then in the wider area as they were out and about. These are serious concerns not to be trivialised by the faux naïve question ‘Are you really implying our police cant [sic] keep the PM safe?’

That’s almost enough about Mr Blackford, although you may like to note his retweet of this tweet by fellow SNP politician Maree Todd:

The reference, if you haven’t looked at the Daily Mail articles, is to the fact that Johnson pitched a small tent on land next to the cottage he was staying in. The farmer whose (currently) unused land it was on was quoted in the Mail’s follow up article linked above as saying:

‘As far as I can see, there is no damage, but there could easily have been.’ Mr Cameron admitted that he was not a fan of Mr Johnson’s politics and was a supporter of Scottish independence.

The tent was perhaps not the most scrupulous adherence to the countryside code I’ve seen, but it’s scarcely a capital offence and hardly warrants Maree Todd’s loaded epithet of #DirtyCamping.

It’s not my normal practice to mention politician’s families: they are scarcely responsible for the views of their relatives. But in this case I make an exception for Mr Blackford’s wife who revealed herself to be very much a political animal in this tweet:

Nice. She, by the way, is Facebook friends with Brian Smith, the former SNP branch convener active in taunting Charles Kennedy. Ian Blackford keeps his list of Facebook friends private but we can see from Mr Smith’s page that he and Ian are indeed also pals. Old transgressions obviously forgiven.

There has been much else on social media and in the public prints about the subject of the prime minister’s Highland holiday. None of it resolves definitively the question of who told the media where he was and we’re left to make our own educated guesses based on the evidence available.

As a final thought, how gratifying it would have been if Mr Blackford had confined himself to a single utterance on the subject after the Mail’s first article, perhaps along the lines of:

Following the Mail’s revelation that the prime minister is holidaying in my beautiful constituency all I can say is, what an excellent choice! We may be political opponents but I hope he, his partner and their child have a wonderful time.

It wouldn’t have been too much to hope for, would it?