Alex Salmond’s Scottish National Party may be a thorn in the side of David Cameron but it’s been a great help to Education Secretary Michael Gove. Last night Riba hosted the fiercely competitive annual PEN Quiz, for which newspapers and publishing houses field teams.
As the Times and Telegraph came top, it went to a tense tie-breaker, which both teams got wrong. Host Hardeep Singh Kohli improvised a supplementary question to break the deadlock. He called up representatives from both teams. Gove, the former Times columnist, stepped forward. Kohli, a high-profile supporter of the SNP, asked: “Who is the deputy leader of the Scottish National Party?”.
The answer is, of course, Nicola Sturgeon, and Gove, a Scot like Kohli, blurted out the answer with school-boy delight. “Eeeurgh ... Nicola Sturgeon!” The Telegraph team was livid at the Scottish bias in the question and formed a delegation of complaint to Kohli, who was having none of it. “Nicola Sturgeon is someone you would expect everyone at the Daily Telegraph to know,” he retorted. That showed them.
