Dirty Washing.

From Alan Taylor, "My fly on the wall in Glesca’s Central Station calls on Friday morning with a strange sighting: Dougie Alexander, meenister for international development, scurrying for the Paisley train. About his person he has a see-through bag about half his size. On further investigation my spy confirms that it is full of dirty washing and surmises that Mr Dougie must be heading home to his mum to have his laundry done. Ever the student! Need I remind readers that Mr Dougie is a member of the Cabinet, charged with ending world poverty and unsanitary plumbing? Has he never heard of launderettes? Or bidie-ins?"

Mr Smith seems to recall that a former Labour MP was infamous for making use of the House of Commons large free postage buff envelopes to post back to Glasgow every day the shirt he had worn so that his better half could have it washed and ironed for him ready to take away again the following Monday.

Separated At Birth.

According to Drumlanrig (via Guido Fawkes), "WRONG, SO WRONG ... Further proof that you can't trust London-based papers to get Scottish stories right. The following comes from Andrew Alexander in last week's Daily Mail. "The head of the Scottish Labour party, Wendy Alexander, is married to cabinet minister Douglas Alexander."Not just wrong, but rather unsavoury too."

Wee Dug.

Mr Smith reads with admiration disclosures that in his student youth Government Minister Douglas Alexander MP was known as "wee Dug" and was the scourge of Edinburgh landlords with his campaigns to better student accomodation.

Mr Smith is even more amazed that "wee Dug" himself then went on to become a landlord by letting out his own £45,000 (1995 prices) Edinburgh flat to students and then had to be served, along with other owners in the building, with an enforcement notice last year by the City of Edinburgh Council to undertake some £500,000 worth of repairs to the building in which his flat sits because of water penetration.

Even more amazing are the disclosures that our Dug was a "hit with the chicks" during his student days. Well you know what they say about the quiet ones ....

Well done Douglas.

Mr Smith reads that former Secretary of State for Scotland, Douglas Alexander MP, has faced calls for his resignation over the "voting fiasco" at May's Scottish Parliament elections when over 140,000 votes cast by the punters were ruled ineligible because of confusion over the voting system for the Holyrood election. Indeed, he has now apologised for his role in the affair.

Now, Mr Smith may be cynical but he suspects given that the SNP effectively "won" May's elections, that the SNP would probably have received even more votes, as would all of the opposition parties, if it hadn't been for the "confusion" over the voting system.

Amidst May's chaos, the Labour share of the vote only fell by a couple of percentage points whilst the SNP's rose by nearly 10%. If it hadn't been for Douglas' mistakes Labour might have lost even more seats in May's elections.

So the real question is perhaps not whether Douglas and other Labour Ministers acted incompetently in the run up to May, but whether they deliberately allowed confusion to be created knowing that their own party would be the main beneficiary of the chaos that ensued? Mr Smith thinks that in some quarters Douglas may actually be getting a pat on the back for his creativity and saving Labour's bacon.