user avatar
Jim Murphy
@glasgowmurphy
Personal account of Rt Hon. Jim Murphy, CEO @ArdenStrategies and lots of other things.
London and Scotland
Joined April 2009
  • Pinned
    user avatar
    🧵What does it feel like to be elected as a new MP as part of a landslide victory? Here are 17 lessons and tips for the new MPs arriving in Westminster today, based on my memories of being elected unexpectedly for the first time in that 1997 win.
  • user avatar
    “ Hello, this is @PippaCrerar calling, I just wanted to ask you about…” must be the most terrifying sound in all of British politics right now.
  • user avatar
    Congratulations to Humza Yousaf on his first anniversary as First Minister. A 🧵 of his most significant achievements to date. He is the only SNP First Minister not to have been arrested. Ends.
  • user avatar
    I've known Sue Gray for over 20 yrs. She has served dozens of Tory, Labour and Lib Dem ministers & 7 PMs. None of us would ever have had the slightest sense of Sue's personal opinions or politics. To suggest otherwise now, reflects badly on her critics rather than on her.
  • user avatar
    I remember being six hours into my holiday in Spain when Russia and Georgia’s 2008 war began. I was FCO minister for Europe. Gordon Brown rightly had me back at my desk that same day.
    Former Labour Defence Secretary and Director General of NATO George Robertson not holding back about Dominic Raab being on holiday. Says “It is stunning....The horrors unfolding with every minute demand focussed attention from the top.”
  • user avatar
    It takes a special brand of duplicitous cynicism to know that you could have given a laptop to every single pupil in Scotland during the pandemic, but hold off doing so just so that you can announce it as an election pledge.
    🗳 👩‍💻 If ⁦@theSNP⁩ is re-elected in May, we will make sure every school pupil from P1 to S6 gets a laptop, Chromebook or tablet. In the digital age this should be as automatic as being given jotters and pencils was in years gone by. #BothVotesSNP dailyrecord.co.uk/scotland-now/n…
  • user avatar
    No-one loves Scotland quite as much as those celebrity Scots who don’t live here. I wonder if the bins get emptied in Hollywood.
    “My country has to be free.” “Anybody who comes here sees the difference between the north and the south.” “Country first. Not politics. Country first.” Sturgeon then bemoans the fact that Brian Cox sees this so much more clearly from New York than people who live in Scotland.
    00:00
  • user avatar
    Happier times from 2014. Remembered today.
  • user avatar
    🧵This week Nicola Sturgeon will become Scotland’s longest serving First Minister – 7 years, 6 months & 6 days. Long enough for anyone to radically reshape a nation. There will always be highs and lows in any govt, but let’s analyse whether her time has seen fundamental change 1/
  • user avatar
    So Parliament agreed to everything that the SNP wanted on Gaza and yet they respond with fury. ‘Yes, it’s a ceasefire but it’s not an SNP ceasefire’, seems to be their tortuous position. It’s almost as if their motion was motivated by something else entirely.
  • user avatar
    I’ve paid for a full-page ad in this week’s Jewish Telegraph. It’s an apology to the Jewish Community about the actions of the Labour Party’s leadership. JM
  • user avatar
    Like lots of racism, their defence will be it’s all ‘harmless fun’. But a better test of whether this is racist is to swap ‘sponging English’ with Irish, or Pakistani, or migrants. This isn’t their fabled joyful civic nationalism. It’s racism.
  • user avatar
    I’m standing at bus stop in central London and just overheard 3 men arguing with one another. I turned around when one called the other a c**t. It was only then that I noticed it was 3 Tory MPs going ‘blue on blue’. I’m not so sure that this Brexit thing is going to end well.
  • user avatar
    For years, a particular brand of English progressive has fetishised the SNP. This, despite rising poverty, secrecy and polarisation in Scotland. After the events of past month surely that fetish can now be buried in a tented garden just outside of Glasgow.