It’s no easy task picking the dimmest of the new intake of Unionist M/SPs. Competition is stiff, what with the likes of Jamie Greene (Con), Dean Lockhart (Con), Jamie Greene (Con), Christine Jardine (Lib), Jamie Greene (Con) and Paul Sweeney (Lab) all putting up a strong showing on a regular basis.

But we have a new(ish) contender for the crown.

The above story is feeble enough as it stands, even allowing for it being a desperately slow news week for Scottish politics. Maureen Watt is 66 years old and has asthma, and making a pensioner with breathing difficulties sprint a mile to get to a speech on time probably isn’t the most cost-effective way for the Parliament to save four and a half quid, once you’ve factored in the cost of the ambulance and everything.

But it gets worse.

Because the rent-an-idiot Tory MSP Kerr called on to provide a quote was this one:

And just imagine how embarrassing it would be if some alert person was to spend 30 seconds checking the Holyrood expenses register and easily find out that Briggs – a man half Watt’s age, who as far as we know has no debilitating respiratory illnesses – had charged even shorter trips of just a few hundred yards to the taxpayer.

(Although if we were carrying as much bulk as Briggs, someone prone to indignantly opining about Scotland’s obesity problem, we wouldn’t be up for much jogging either.)

It’s not even the ludicrous hypocrisy we mind. It’s the galactic stupidity of making such a statement knowing that people would check and would find him out. We look forward to Aidan Kerr’s surely-imminent report on the matter.