The Daily Mail evidently decided the first headline wasn’t mad enough.

First and second versions here.

We can’t help but be reminded of George Foulkes’ infamous 2008 complaint that the SNP were improving public services “deliberately”, the evil fiends. The Mail seems to be genuinely upset that the Scottish Government has chosen to spend some of its fixed, deficit-free budget on a spanky new state-of-the-art hospital for the people of Glasgow rather than, we don’t know, a giant anti-immigrant laser or something.

(Not until a long way down the article are we told that the SGUH replaces four existing hospitals, and it’s not mentioned at all that the cost of building the new one has been or will be partly offset by selling their land.)

Weirdly, the paper then goes on to contrast the mega-facility with privately-run NHS hospitals in England, which have suffered financial catastrophes under commercial management, wrapping the whole piece off with outraged quotes from an unnamed UKIP spokesman bleating on about the Scots being subsidy junkies as usual.

We haven’t been able to find the story in the Mail’s print edition. We suspect the reason is that readers in Scotland will go “A top-of-the-range new hospital courtesy of the Scottish Government, brilliant”, while English readers would think “Lucky Scots, having their NHS kept in public hands and still being able to do this” – two reactions which don’t serve the Mail’s anti-SNP, pro-privatisation agenda.

But that does rather cast a question over what it’s doing on the website. We suspect, like most of the rest of the media, that the SNP’s continuing stratospheric poll numbers have simply driven them mad.