Wings Over Scotland | Kings Of Crisis Management

If you subscribe to the theory that it’s better to fight 100 duck-sized horses than a single horse-sized duck, the SNP is knocking it out of the park today.

Because the papers just can’t make their minds up about the biggest story with which to attack John Swinney’s beleaguered party.

While the Sun leads with Sean Clerkin reigniting his police complaint over the missing fundraiser money, the Herald goes with Peter Murrell’s receipt of legal aid for his non-defence against embezzlement charges.

The Express and the Mail, on the other hand, focus on Swinney’s bombshell public admission of yesterday that the fundraiser money has in fact been spent.

In the Times, the big news is that Murrell managed to have almost £60,000 of thefts – most of them apparently for the benefit of Nicola Sturgeon – removed from his charge sheet in exchange for his early guilty plea.

Whereas the Daily Record takes some pity on the poor former CEO while also feeding its own unending obsession with “gangland” by leading on suggestions that the small, hamsterish executive might be picked on in HMP Edinburgh.

The Record is in fact remarkably charitable to the party all the way through today’s edition. Yesterday’s astonishing, unprecedented ruling of contempt of court against the Scottish Government over the Salmond inquiry is relegated to a tiny bar on the bottom of page 4 that doesn’t even mention the word “contempt”, (reporting merely that the government was “criticised” in the Court of Session) while Swinney’s admission that the fundraiser money was stolen is hidden away in a small side column on the left-hand page of its prison pity piece.

The Scotsman and Telegraph also go relatively easy, both of them putting Swinney’s fundraiser admission on the front page but in sidebars, not as the main splash.

And God bless the dear old National, a Scottish newspaper which tries to make the day all about Westminster MP Douglas Alexander, Westminster lord Peter Mandelson, NHS England and some Welsh Senedd minister nobody’s ever heard of.

Though they do reluctantly include the Swinney admission in a very thin flash at the bottom of the page, somewhat in contrast to the degree of prominence they gave their last big story about the fundraiser money.

So great work, SNP comms team. We’re sure things will calm down any day now.