Nicola Sturgeon called Willie Rennie an attention seeker, and John Swinney wasn't 'horrified' then – John McLellan

If Liz Truss thought throwing that attention-seeker insult at Nicola Sturgeon was a first, she was quickly proved wrong when a clip resurfaced of the First Minister making the same accusation against former Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie in 2018.

Nicola Sturgeon, like most politicians, is an attention seeker (Picture: Andy Buchanan - Pool/Getty Images)

Not just any old attention seeker but a pathetic one, according to Ms Sturgeon, which her deputy John Swinney must surely accept was an “obnoxious” thing to say if he’s being consistent, given that is how he described Ms Truss.

But of course, “Honest John” was not “horrified”, as he said we all should be last week (he speaks for the whole of Scotland, after all), but loyally applauded his boss’s aggressive response, itself designed to deflect attention away from the fact that she had claimed a children’s hospital ward was staying open when the opposite was the case.

Now Anas Sarwar is at it too, with the Scottish Labour leader sticking the label on departing Prime Minister Boris Johnson, adding that the only thing Mr Johnson believes in himself.

I have never met a leading politician who didn’t believe in themselves, and if any of them are not attention seekers of one kind or another then I’ve yet to meet one.

If you spend your professional life telling people you know best how they should all lead their lives, then a certain amount of self-confidence comes in handy. And if you’ve got something very important to say, which they all believe they have, then you’ll want to, er, seek their attention.