Sketch: James Dornan apologises, sort of

James Dornan has apologised for making it seem like he thought the abuse suffered by a female journalist was imaginary, when he said her woes were imaginary.

“Language is important,” the SNP MSP said, and went on the explain that the word he used was not to be understood as the word he used.

The sort-of apology came after former Scotland editor at the BBC, Sarah Smith, spoke of the abuse she received when covering politics.

Smith has just moved to America to take up a new role and she described her “relief” at leaving Scotland, because she would be “gloriously anonymous” in the States.

Smith, who is the daughter of former Labour leader John Smith, added: “Nobody will have any idea who my father is. So, the misogynistic idea that I can’t have any of my own thoughts any way, or rise above my family connections to report impartially, will no longer be part of the discourse.”

Dornan, having clearly only read the headline and not the article, took to Twitter to say: “America would be the go to place to escape all her imaginary woes then.”

Later backtracking, he said: “Imaginary was the wrong word to use, should have been ‘exaggerated’. Any abuse she suffered is too much but if Sarah Smith is saying that politics over here is more vicious than in the US she hasn’t been paying enough attention to what has been going on over there, nor the rest of UK.”

Not that Smith had made any such comments suggesting politics was less vicious outside of Scotland, simply that assumptions about her views because of her father had made vitriol worse.

But Dornan – a man who once contested his party’s plan to implement an all-female shortlist in his constituency after he had announced his retirement and then months later unannounced his retirement – wasn’t about to let what a woman actually said get in the way of what he thinks. She might have received some abuse, he admits, but she was probably exaggerating.

Women are overly emotional, of course, and can’t be trusted to talk about their experiences as a result. Must be something to do with all those hormones circulating from their ovaries, right? It causes hysteria.

So when Smith revealed she had been yelled at in the street and called “a fucking lying bitch”, that was exaggeration. She was probably yelled at in the street and simply called “a lying bitch”. Slightly less bad, you’ll agree.

But then it seems a bit of pressure must have come down on Dornan, because he deleted his first tweets and made an attempt at an apology.

“I apologise for my earlier comments that made it seem as though I believed the abuse Sarah Smith has suffered was imaginary,” he said. He is sorry that you thought that what he meant by what he said was what he said, instead of what he meant. We should have known that by “imaginary woes”, he did not mean “woes” that were “imaginary”.

He continued: “No matter differing opinions, the misogynistic abuse of women in the public eye is never acceptable. If we want to tackle the issue, then we all need to recognise the problem is on all sides and all countries.” Starting close to home, perhaps. To paraphrase what Smith herself said, this is “shit [we] can live without”.

But Dornan is full of hot takes. Remember the time he was forced to apologise for using the word “fag” in relation to then Tory MP Ross Thomson? He later clarified he was referring to the public school practice of “fagging”, not the modern understanding of the word. He said he’d “apologised for any misunderstanding of the use of the word”. Hmm.

And Dornan also once warned Jacob Rees-Mogg that “if your god exists you will undoubtedly rot in hell”. After that particular foot-in-mouth moment, Dornan was forced to set his Twitter account to private. If only he’d kept it that way.

Meanwhile, another SNP MSP seemed to fumble her words recently too. Transport minister Jenny Gilruth seemed to cast doubt on the data modelling profession as a whole when she bizarrely suggested it wasn’t possible to do modelling on things that haven’t happened.

Tory MSP Liam Kerr was quizzing the minister on workplace parking regulations when he said the government had failed to “model what the impact of that scheme would be”.

“I don’t agree that we have not modelled it but we can’t model something that doesn’t exist,” replied Gilruth, seemingly unaware of the clear contradiction in that statement. The modelling that hasn’t not been done doesn’t not exist.

“How can we model something that doesn’t yet exist?” she goes on to ask, completely misunderstanding the point of modelling.

Kerr tried to intervene: “You just said it did exist.” Which isn’t exactly true. She said she didn’t agree that it hadn’t been modelled. This is Schrödinger’s model, apparently.

“We can’t model in advance of the scheme’s having taken place. We have to trust our local authority partners to do this,” Gilruth insisted.

“Extraordinary,” muttered Kerr, a sentiment which I think everyone watching would concur with.