This is Spectator columnist Alex Massie reacting earlier this week to the news of Alex Salmond doing a show for Russian news channel RT.

Alex Salmond is these days a private individual with no responsibilities to anyone, and RT is a legal, Ofcom-licenced UK broadcaster whose output is beamed free into every home in the land.

The first episode of The Alex Salmond Show featured guests from both Labour and the Tories, opened with lengthy discussion and advocation of women’s and LGBT rights, followed by a 15-minute interview with deposed Catalan president Carles Puigdemont – something which has proven beyond the capabilities of mainstream UK news outlets despite the remarkable events currently engulfing an EU member state.

(BBC Scotland, we should perhaps note at this point, does not currently carry a single dedicated political TV show from a Scottish perspective at all and hasn’t done for more than a year.)

Massie used some slightly more measured language when it came to writing about the show in the Spectator, merely describing Salmond as an “idiot”, a “fool”, a “chump”, “pitiful”, “embarrassing” and “disgraceful”. But when it came to another former Scottish party leader, he was for some reason in a rather more forgiving mood.

Kezia Dugdale, unlike Alex Salmond, still has a day job in politics. Despite resigning as Scottish Labour branch office leader, she remains a list MSP for the Lothian region, and is paid over £61,000 a year by the taxpayer to represent the people of that area.

She’s chosen, though, to take three weeks off from that job in order to appear on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, during which time the people of Lothian can presumably go and get stuffed.

(She’ll be donating her salary to charity while on the show, but that doesn’t help people who need the services of their member of parliament, and the financial sacrifice will be outweighed many times over by the fee Dugdale will be paid for appearing, of which she’s pledged only “a portion” to good causes.)

So you’d expect Alex Massie to be pretty hopping mad about it, right?

But all he can manage is a weary, vaguely disapproving “good luck to her”.

We have no idea how much Salmond’s production company is being paid to make The Alex Salmond Show, but we suspect that it’s a somewhat less profitable endeavour than Kezia Dugdale’s jungle adventure.

And we’re also pretty sure that raising women’s rights, LGBT rights and the situation in Catalonia is a more honourable pursuit than eating kangaroo’s genitals for laughs and money, even if Dugdale occasionally manages to squeeze in a bit of politics chat with some mouth-breathing bubblewit from TOWIE or Made In Chelsea between waterfall showers and Bush Tucker Trials.

But the sheer temerity of Alex Salmond in yet again refusing to lie down and die when indignant Unionist hacks wanted him to will never be forgiven as long as he lives, and is the frame through which all Scottish political journalism should always be viewed.