Wings Over Scotland's Stuart Campbell can't seem to get this point about his failed legal case against Kezia Dugdale

Wings Over Scotland blogger Stuart Campbell lost his bid to sue former Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale for defamation (Picture: Andrew Milligan/PA Wire)

Even for the high-priest of political vitriol, the bitter attack by Stuart Campbell, the nationalist aggressive blogger behind Wings Over Scotland, on ex-Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale takes some beating.

Mr Campbell sued Ms Dugdale for defamation after she accused him in her Daily Record column of sending “homophobic tweets”, but he lost and after his appeal was dismissed this week he referred to her as “full of a child’s pouting, narcissistic malice but without a discernible scrap of adult intelligence”.

I don’t think a word of that is true, but is it defamatory?

It is clearly Mr Campbell’s honest opinion which he is entitled to express, so the answer is no.

That’s the bit he never quite got.

Why free tuition fees may not survive Covid

As the hideous Salmond Stone is removed from Heriot-Watt University, the promise that rocks will melt in the sun before tuition fees are introduced could be another political totem the virus will destroy.

The Reform Scotland think tank has once again called for a deferred fee system for Scottish students, in which repayments are made only when a certain income level is reached, based on the principle that on average, a university graduate earns more.

Why it is fair for those who do not go to university to subsidise those who do through their taxes has always escaped me, but a lot of pride will need to be swallowed as the full implications of the crisis are understood.

More immediately, free tuition for EU students is an anomaly which Brexit will solve and there should be no hesitation in bringing that to a halt while English and Welsh students must pay.

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Wings Over Scotland's Stuart Campbell can't seem to get this point about his failed legal case against Kezia Dugdale – John McLellan