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The National (Scotland)
The National (Scotland)
National
The Jouker

BBC blunder sees Scots Tory leader Douglas Ross completely mislabelled

DOUGLAS Ross might seem like a simple name to remember, but the Scottish Tory leader has had to deal with people getting it wrong on more than one occasion.

In one memorable incident, even his former boss Boris Johnson couldn't get the poor Scottish Tory leader's name right.

But then, that was slightly better than the words his Conservative colleagues at Westminster have otherwise used to describe him...

The latest blunder at Ross's expense came on the BBC's Politics Live on Wednesday.

The programme showed a clip of the Scottish Tory leader asking a question in the House of Commons.

However, eagle-eyed viewers who knew who Ross was – apparently a vanishingly small number of people – spotted a pretty glaring mistake.

The programme appeared to claim Ross was in fact Simon Lightwood (below), a Labour MP who represents Wakefield – about 400 miles away from Ross's Moray constituency.

The BBC blunder is bad news for the Scottish Tory leader, who clearly hasn't made enough of an impact to be recognisable south of the Border.

Perhaps the confusion came from the much publicised "lightweight" accusations thrown at Ross by his own Tory colleagues. It's not so far from "Lightwood" after all.

Either way, Ross was asking about the Scottish Government's "naive" plans to halt oil and gas exploration after Michael Matheson said production in the North Sea would effectively end within the next 20 years.

Whether that is a pressing issue for the people of West Yorkshire is unclear.

Perhaps if Ross was able to pull himself away from his colleagues down south, stop pandering to their every need, and listened to the people of Scotland, perhaps more of us would remember his name.

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