For anybody outside of Scotland Spannergate is incomprehensible and nobody really cares about it, like the Scotch people themselves, but, also like the Scotch people, it’s creating a lot of noise and refusing to go away to sleep it off.

To help out those who are struggling to keep up here is a quick summary of the story so far…

It all started with J. K. Rowling, who isn’t just the richest woman in Scotland not to be running a mortgage scam or skimming off public donations, but is also the creator of Hogwarts – the model for all Scottish schools, where only one child a year meets a violent death and nobody ever asks about the maths or English results.

Because of her status as national treasure Ms Rowling was nationalised in 2014 and is now governed by the Rowling (Permissible Activities) Act of 2015. On the evening of Thursday 28 January freedom-loving SNP outcast, Natalie McGarry, noticed that the terms of this act may have been breached by Ms Rowling communicating via Twitter with somebody who the SNP had declared an un-person, the now infamous Brian Spanner.

Spurred on by a genuine desire to make Twitter a nicer place for all women Scottish Nationalists immediately set to work ignoring the beam in their own eye and searching through Brian Spanner’s 78,000 tweets for 16 that they could sell to the national press as being vile and misogynistic.  These tweets were published on the web-site of economics guess-monger and 4’7″ fountain of eternal hate, Wings Over Scotland, who is widely agreed to be both objective and fair in all matters relating to J. K. Rowling.

Around this time people began to realise that annoying someone who can afford to employ both of the lawyers in Scotland might not be a great idea, and that it was probably best left to the politicians to dictate to a woman who she can befriend on-line without damaging women’s on-line freedom. And so attention turned to Spanner…

Despite the fact that there has never been a recorded case of anybody receiving real-life abuse, threats or actual violence, or having their employment threatened because of on-line spats, Spanner appeared to be posting under a pseudonym for no reason at all. From this revelation the train of logic was as inescapable as it was worthy of Holmes himself…

• If ‘Brian Spanner’ is an alias then there must be a real person behind the account!
• Because the Nationalist cause is so self-evidently right and righteous there couldn’t possibly be somebody opposed to it who wasn’t already in the pay of the evil Tories.
• Most of Spanner’s Twitter feed is words and pictures; do you know who else likes communicating in words and pictures? That’s right, journalists!
• There was evidence that both Rowling and Spanner had read things written by journalists.  They even followed some of the same journalists.  The same Unionist journalists.

As plainly as jet fuel not burning hot enough to melt steel beams Spanner had to be an anti-Nationalist (i.e. anti-Scotland) journalist.  Even if you’re not the sort to believe in conspiracy theories you have to admit that there isn’t a single gap in that logic.  The key suspect, Euan McColm, hasn’t explicitly denied being Brian Spanner, even though the Cybernats have taken a break from calling him a cunt to ask him politely to do so.  Damning!

That brings us up to date.  Nationalists are raging impotently against something they are billing as a conspiracy against them, which is exactly what they were doing before Spannergate as well, but about something different, and everybody else is getting on their lives.

As letting go and moving on are the two key strengths of Scottish Nationalists this is likely to be the last we hear of the matter.

[This space reserved for links to Spannergate parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Scottish election night Spannergate special, 7a, 7b, 8 thu 91 and Spannergate: A retrospective on life before the nuclear winter]