Poor old Daily Record.

What a distance to fall.

It can’t be easy to be the declining tabloid’s Westminster political correspondent these days. Accustomed to decades of spoon-fed stories from tame Scottish Labour MPs, the SNP landslide of 2015 has left Crichton’s contacts book barer than Kezia Dugdale’s talent cupboard.

The resentment has been building up for the last 11 months, and Torcuil just hasn’t been able to hold it back a moment longer, exploding all over page 25 today in what isn’t so much a column as a last desperate cry for help.

It bears a close examination, so buckle in, readers.

It has? Since April 2014? Five months before the independence referendum and seven months before Sturgeon was even the leader of the party? That’s some impressive forward thinking.

The post-referendum bloom that nobody saw coming? Or is Torcuil suddenly telling us that he foresaw the SNP more than quadrupling its membership and going from six MPs to 56 in one leap? We don’t remember him mentioning it at the time, but maybe we’ve just forgotten.

Absolutely no “deal” has been signed, of course. There’s not a shred of evidence that SinoFortone, the Chinese company involved, is “shady” – UK civil servant Sir Richard Heygate, who advised on the talks, says they’re “squeaky clean”. And we’re not sure why Brian Souter’s opinion is relevant to anything, but shouldn’t EVERYONE be “delighted” if it turns out that £10bn investment does come to Scotland?

A deal so “secret” there are photographs of the signing ceremony all over the internet, because the company put out a press release about it on its website the same day and it was reported in the Scotsman a few days later:

We can only assume that to Torcuil, anything not whispered to him by a Labour MP over gin and tonics on the terrace of the Strangers’ Bar counts as a secret.

Oh well, if permanently, comically bitter anti-devolution ex-Labour MP and nuclear power fanboy Brian Wilson said something, it MUST be legit. We do hope Torcuil tries to make the phrase “infamous Sino-Souter memo” stick.

(We’re also impressed by his esoteric use of punctuation. Full stops at the end of sentences are for squares, daddio. And HAS Sturgeon been under pressure to explain? We keenly await the answer to that apparent question.)

We’re not sure in what sense the explanations are “flaky”. There’s nothing to report, just talks about talks. Had the Scottish Government made a song and dance about it, the opposition parties would have screamed about an announcement of no substance being used as an election tool. But the details of the memorandum were promptly released in full for maximum transparency.

This is spectacular. The “cash for honours” enquiry wasn’t undertaken because the SNP complained. It happened because the Metropolitan Police decided there was a case to answer. When the matter came to light the Labour Party had to pay back “loans” it had been given by people who were subsequently awarded titles. And the conclusion was hardly a resounding proclamation of innocence:

It was a case not entirely unlike most of the expenses scandal or the more recent one involving Alistair Carmichael, in that pretty much everyone agreed there had been some enormously dodgy goings-on, but in the strictest technical sense there was no absolutely definitive proof that the letter of the law had been breached.

It’s an odd wound for a hyper-partisan Labour hack to reopen, let’s put it that way.

We’re almost at maximum froth now. Apparently “the machinery of government is prostrated” means “there wasn’t a press release”. There’s not the slightest suggestion that Brian Souter stands to gain in any way from any deal that may eventually happen – talks have apparently focused on clean energy projects and building affordable housing, fields in which Souter has no business interests whatsoever.

(His companies deal in public transport and insurance. But the prospect of major investment in renewables does at least suggest why Brian Wilson is so angry.)

Next we get a festival of weasel words which amount to “there is no actual evidence that the company has done anything wrong”. And frankly, we’re not even sure why Scottish people should care if the company had paid a few bribes in its lifetime anyway. Bribery is how things generally get done in China.

Torcuil also didn’t mind when SinoFortone was investing in the UK, not Scotland:

The company’s name has never featured in the Record until the last few days. At this point Torcuil loses his last few marbles.

We don’t know what to do with that, frankly.

“The propaganda output of Communist China”? It’s not the first description we’d come up with for The Scotsman, but each to their own, we suppose.

The SIC is an independent role not controlled by the Scottish Government. It answers for its own decisions. But sod it, let’s pin it on the First Minister anyway. SNP BAD!

Torcuil’s got at least five tinfoil hats on now as he works himself into a frenzy, pointing at the sky and shrieking about chemtrails and spiders and probably lizards. We’re not exactly sure how much power he thinks the Scottish Government wields over Qatar’s human-rights records, but we’re moved by his sudden concern for poetry.

We don’t recall the Record lambasting Qatar overly much about the fate of its poets until there was a chance to attack the SNP over it, mind you. Again, as far as we can make out this is the first time it’s ever mentioned them.

Nor did Torcuil or the Record voice any qualms about Qatar’s human rights record when one of their political heroes was doing its ruling royal family some favours:

And then we’re off onto Torcuil’s inexplicable obsession with Brian Souter again. His bloodied stumps of fingers are now hammering so frenetically at the keyboard that letters are just going anywhere, with Souter’s name swapping an A and an E with the word “altar” as the details of Souter’s business schedule seemingly become the concern and responsibility of every SNP MP:

And then we get a spectacular final flourish in which at the last minute the whole thing suddenly and bewilderingly becomes about the steel industry:

So to recap: there’s been no deal of any kind with anyone, none of it involves steel, as far as we can tell Brian Souter had absolutely nothing to do with it anywhere along the line but there are unanswered questions about the colour of his shoes, somehow the poets of Qatar are implicated along with diplomatic spiders, but it all proves that you can’t trust Nicola Sturgeon.

We’re going to have a bit of a lie down now, readers. If any of this starts making any sense at any point, we’ll get back to you. The one thing that DOES add up, though, is the rate at which the Daily Record’s sales figures are vanishing down the toilet.

Tick, as we’ve been heard to say, tock.