One armed bandit front bench reshuffle.

Walking charisma void Iain Gray and erstwhile leader of the Labour group in the Scottish Parliament, has reshuffled his dynamic front bench team, with an even more err dynamicer team.


In a move akin to juggling deckchairs on the Titanic, Mr Gray's attempts to spice up his team are pretty difficult to satirise.

For example, noted human vacuum, Jackie the Hutt replaces Cathydoll Jamieson as party health spokesperson. No doubt this has less to do with her renowned physical appearance and more to do with the fact that she gurned loudest and longest about the nine clostridium difficile deaths deaths at the Vale of Leven hospital, which happened between December 2007 and June 2008 and were entirely Nicola Sturgeon's fault, because obviously viruses become stronger under an SNP government.

Cathydoll moves to housing and regeneration, which is pretty laughable given her constituency suffers from crap housing stock and is so weighted down by the dead hand of Labour that regeneration has little chance of success.

Other nova bright moves are  Rhona Brankin stepping down as education spokeswoman for family reasons. To replaced by Clydebank and Milngavie MSP Des McNulty. 

Former Health minister Andy Kerr has more burdens added to his already poorly handled finance and economy remit.

Hamilton North and Bellshill MSP Michael McMahon becomes local government spokesman.

John Park has been dumped from his economy and skills role and has been handed the poisoned chalice of elections and campaign portfolio, he still gets to keep his seat in the shadow cabinet. 

There is still no place in the front bench team for the venerable Baron George Foulkes von Cumnock. A vote winner if ever there was one. 

This is the last roll of the dice, the last tug on the puggy machine for Gray, if Labour lose Glasgow North East, you can bet your bottom dollar Gray will get it in the neck from Spud Murphy, Darling and Broon himself. The oddest fact to emerge from the whole murky reshuffle is that it takes 27 Labour MSP's to shadow an SNP Ministerial team of 16 - some 60 percent of the the entire labour Parliamentary group! Go figure.