Scandal, What Scandal?

Journalists are in some danger, one feels, of wearing out certain words the meaning of which they seem to be ill acquainted with.

I know what a scandal is. It is not a scandal that I am not chauffeur-driven around or that Joe Bloggs is not chauffeur-driven around, because neither he nor I need to carry around with us on official business or even to and from home and elsewhere large quantities of official documents marked "in confidence", "confidential" or "secret", etc., the loss or mislaying of which on a no. 9 bus or elsewhere would be a scandal and would be pounced upon as such by your newspaper and others.

Joe Bloggs and I are not in charge of the civil service in Scotland, nor do we have ministerial responsibilities, which are no more confined to an office than they are confined to office hours. Senior civil servants and government ministers, as you very well know, have to carry sensitive government papers around with them and must do so securely.

Or perhaps you think they should not carry such papers around with them securely. Perhaps you actually think that they should wander around the streets with them tucked under their arms and perhaps you will not mind and will quite understand when government documents go astray in one way or another in the course of numerous time-consuming perambulations in all weathers around the not notably safe streets of our cities.

Government business is urgent and needs to be secure. At levels of the highest responsibility this requires secure transportation. The present Scottish Government is plainly doing what it can to keep this to a minimum. It is plainly doing better than its predecessors.

Any suggestion that civil-service and political heads of government departments should not be chauffeur-driven for the reasons stated above is completely ill conceived.

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