Holyrood sketch: Salmond's metamorphosis

It's been a happy few weeks for the prime minister, as he gets his economist's hands dirty trying to deconstruct a financial crisis that a decade of Blairism helped to build. Ironic, isn't it, that Gordon Brown spent the better part of that decade waiting to lead the country, only to find that once he got the job, all the country needed was a good chancellor.

Irony abounds north of the border, too: the first minister has seen a year of triumph for the SNP evaporate just as Gordon Brown gets off the mat, with a first major defeat over banning sales of alcohol to under-21s coming on the heels of damning press coverage of his opportunistic interventions in the HBOS buyout. The bags are growing under Alex Salmond's eyes. There may soon be little to separate him from the parochial "Gordon Broon" of Steve Bell's Guardian cartoons: "Save yer poonds! Eat up all yer food!"

A worn but energetic Alex Salmond appeared only minutes prior to his weekly grilling before the assembled Scottish Parliament. He had many questions and detractors to face down this week as in his words, “the current economic crisis begins to affect the real Scottish economy,” and the controversial flagship Scottish Nationalist policy of raising the legal age to purchase alcohol in Scotland came under fire.

Rather conspicuously at the forefront of parliament's collected minds is the current banking crisis, so it was appropriate that first on the agenda were Iain Gray's questions concerning the First Minister's planned response to the downturn. His initial comments, supporting Salmond's call last week that party political capital should not be minted from the recession, were amusing as he immediately swung into a stream of fawning compliments directed towards the “decisive” actions of chancellor Alistair Darling and prime minister, Gordon Brown in re-capitalising the struggling bank Lloyds-HBOS, revealing his own blatant party loyalties.

There appeared to be general consensus that the parliament must invest more in public works, such as roads, schools and infrastructure, to boost investment in the economy and create jobs. The Labour MSP's final comments contained a chill warning to the first minister, noting that oil prices are also affected by the economic downturn and stating that Scotland must diversify to form a more robust economy – to which Salmond retorted that the merger of Lloyds-HBOS, backed by the Labour government, had weakened one of the oldest and largest of Scotland's institutions and employers.

Salmond was fully loaded with supporting facts and figures for his proposal while opponents appeared ill prepared. Conservative calls that the age group most likely to be involved in alcohol related crime was 16-18 year olds—a group who would remain unaffected by the legislation—were unsupported and quickly shot down by Salmond's statistics from the pilot scheme. The Conservatives echoed EUSA's own Tom French, spokesperson for the Coalition Against Raising the Drinking Age in Scotland (Cardas), stating that raising the drinking age would simply criminalise normally law-abiding young people, particularly students.

The First Minister treated the whole proceeding in a more constructive vein than Prime Minister's questions. The “bull pen” confrontational atmosphere of Westminster was not entirely absent but Salmond altered the tone by repeatedly asking for constructive suggestions to address alcohol induced young offenses.