Something really quite strange happened yesterday. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was caught red-handed in the act of telling a bare-faced, unarguable lie in the middle of a general election campaign, and nobody cared.

Reacting to the Crown Prosecution Service decision not to prosecute dozens of Tory MPs who’d broken the law in getting elected in 2015, the PM offered up a quote, which was reported in most of the newspapers:

Nice wee bit of snark on “all the major parties, and the Scottish nationalists” there. But there’s a slight problem with the statement, which is that it’s an absolute lie.

Alone among the UK’s political journalists, the Scottish Sun’s home affairs editor Chris Musson undertook a bit of journalism, and discovered the claim was completely untrue. While Labour and the Liberal Democrats had also been fined (£20,000 each) over irregularities in campaign spending in 2015, no such thing had happened to the SNP in that or any other year.

So that’d be quite big news in the Scottish press at least, right? The Prime Minister telling a complete bare-faced lie against the party with 54 of Scotland’s 59 MPs less than a month before an election is a fairly significant thing, you might imagine.

Other than the Scottish Sun itself (which has both a report and an editorial leader on the subject), not a single newspaper today mentions it.

Most simply gloss over the story by not mentioning the quote at all. The Daily Record relegates the entire story to a tiny corner of its “campaign trail” page:

The Scotsman led a two-page spread with it, but didn’t include the quote.

The Mail also ignored the quote, focusing its coverage instead on a personal smear against the Electoral Commission’s head of regulation over social-media comments she made seven years ago, before she was employed by the Commission:

But there was worse to come. The BBC did include the quote in its main website article on the story, but carefully edited the Prime Minister’s words to remove the reference to the SNP – in effect actively covering up the fact that she’d lied:

Worst of all, though, was the Herald.

In a substantial report on page 6 of today’s paper the Herald includes May’s quote in full, while making no mention of the fact that it’s completely untrue. Furthermore, it then quotes Nicola Sturgeon talking about the case more generally.

Any casual reader would therefore come to the conclusion there that the allegation must have been true, since the quote has been given and then the First Minister has been quoted straight afterwards without denying it. But in fact both Sturgeon and Alex Salmond (on Channel 4 News) had given strongly-worded responses pointing out May’s lie, which the Herald chose not to report.

We invite readers to imagine the Scottish media’s response if it was the FM who’d been caught in such a blatant falsehood.

The whitewash might be halfway-understandable if the Prime Minister lying had been drowned out in some other major Scottish political news. But the Herald’s front-page lead is a joke of a Some Arsehole story about unnamed “experts” allegedly suggesting that the Kremlin will oppose Scottish independence at some point in the future:

While the Record and Scotsman lead with an utterly bewildering story about a bunch of student thickos who apparently have inadequate basic numeracy skills, yet who’ve inexplicably and irresponsibly applied for jobs as teachers and appear to be blaming the SNP for the fact that they can’t count.

And the Mail and Express have similarly limp non-stories in which company directors pay themselves big bonuses during a corporate merger (shock!) and the ultra-Unionist, ultra-Brexiter leader of the Scottish Fishing Federation, Bertie Armstrong, takes the UK government’s side over the Scottish Government about Brexit (well we never).

Only the Scottish Sun apparently thinks it’s at all significant that the Prime Minister is going around blithely telling unchallenged lies:

We suspect we’re not the only people to find that a little concerning.