At first I thought it was a summer cold starting. The symptoms were straightforward enough - a pronounced and uncontrollable twitching of the nose, rather like Samantha in Bewitched.

Samantha, if you recall, was a “good” witch who lived in suburbia among the mere mortals. To show she was casting a spell her nose would wrinkle in a cute fashion. The reason for my tic wasn’t as obvious. Time for some empirical testing. Handily, the Sunday Mail had the very thing.

“Fury over £300k for Sturgeon book fest” was the splash headline over pictures of the former First Minister and her ex-aide Liz Lloyd. Ms Lloyd was appointed a director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival in May, the paper reported. In June, the Scottish Government announced it had given the festival £300,000. Meanwhile, Ms Lloyd’s old boss had been given a plum spot at the festival to publicise her new memoir, Frankly.

My nose twitched. The eyebrows went skywards, but why?

Here’s the Sunday Mail again: “The book festival said it would be ‘spurious’ and ‘misleading’ to suggest any link between Lloyd’s appointment and the announcement of the cash, which it said had been planned for months.”

Interesting choice of words there, particularly “spurious”. It’s the kind of ten-dollar word a lawyer might use when a simple “wrong” would have done. It is there to send a message: nothing to see here folks, so let’s all just shuffle on.

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