Party political petticoats ABOUT . . .WENDY'S DEBUT IAIN MACWHIRTER

Sunday Herald, The, Sep 23, 2007 by IAIN MACWHIRTER

ANNABEL Goldie called it "a petticoat strangle" with the slightly lurid coquettishness the Scottish Tory leader brings to parliamentary occasions. It was Alex Salmond's first conflict with the women at first minister's question time.

Petticoats at dawn - well, midday. Would Alex hold the Y-front with pride, or would he go down, caught in a hail of underwear between Annabel and Wendy Alexander, the new leader of Scottish Labour?

In a desperate attempt to switch metaphors, Salmond told Annabel that he felt a little like the "meat in the sandwich".

A curiously pornographic image flitted across my mind before the rest of my brain resolved not to go there. Certainly, Salmond looked the big enchilada as he batted away wee Wendy's strangely illconceived attack on the SNP for allegedly wanting to remove universal entitlement to free central heating for pensioners.

But the government isn't intending to means-test free central heating, which rather undermined the thrust of this line of questioning. Wendy is supposed to be much better at doing her homework than Jack The Mouth, especially on economics, so it was strange that her first assault was based on someone in the Labour group being told that someone had heard SNP communities minister Stewart whatsisname say something about targeting, er, something or other. Well. it's an easy mistake to make.

Mind you, the viewers might not have thought it was such a pushover for Big Eck. The dynamics of question time were subtly altered by the presence of a woman at the head of the now almost entirely female Labour front bench. Apart from the odd token man, like Malcolm Chisholm, there is scarcely a boxer short left in the front rank of Scottish Labour.

Salmond has yet to find a way of dealing with the new sexual dynamics of question time. It's not so easy to crush women with those cutting put-downs for which the SNP leader is famous. He found it noticeably easier to deal with the few remaining Labour men, like Iain Gray and Andy Kerr, who were left bruised and angry after feeling the back of Salmond's hand. You just can't do that to a woman. Not nowadays.

Partly it is the apparent unfairness of the contest, since against the very large, male SNP leader, Wendy Alexander looks vulnerable and almost girlish, despite being over 40. We all know she can look after herself, but it looks unequal, and Salmond's smirk of self-satisfaction doesn't help. The danger for Salmond is that he looks either patronising or a bully. The SNP leader isn't renowned in his own party for his subtlety in dealing with its female members.

Salmond hasn't quite got the measure of the women's vote yet, and the other half of Scotland is waiting to see whether he can get the tone right. So, following Annabel, you could say that petticoats are Labour's new secret weapon. Except that, somehow, I find it difficult to envisage Wendy Alexander or Margaret Curran or Sarah Boyack actually wearing them. Or not wearing them. (This column will stop here owing to an excess of lurid metaphor. )