Alex Salmond got a few headlines this week when Iain Dale announced that he would be hosting a weekly half hour phone in with the SNP’s foreign affairs spokesperson Alex Salmond. The first one is at 4pm next Wednesday.

So, Salmond gets the chance to wind up Middle England,in advance of the EU Referendum. No doubt the Leave campaign, just like the Tories during the election, will be listening carefully to his comments. The SNP, and Salmond, are very much pro EU but there is the inescapable fact that it would suit them fine if England voted to leave and Scotland voted to stay in. That would give them the excuse for a second referendum on independence. I’ve often said that that would be my tipping point to voting yes, but having seen the price of oil plummet to barely a third of the SNP’s estimates, I worry about whether we would be able to create the sort of fair, compassionate society that we want to see.

You do have to wonder why LBC invited Salmond to do it. After all, it’s usually been party leaders who have participated in these things, Nick Clegg being the first with his two years of Call Clegg. The argument that Nicola is in Edinburgh and Salmond in London doesn’t wash as Clegg was quite often around the country when he took part. They could easily have had Nicola take part from Edinburgh.

To celebrate the new show, LBC got Alex Salmond to read some mean tweets about himself but how did he do compared to others?

There was a certain smugness and condescension about how he did it, but it was certainly funny. The tweets were mild compared to the stuff the cybernats produce, though.

Nick Clegg did the same thing for the Sun just before the election and probably enjoyed it a bit too much:

But neither of these could possibly live up to the coolest of them all.

Is this the sort of thing that politicians should be encouraged to be doing, though, to convince us that they are just like us? If it was a break from usually rational, calm and sensible political debate about issues rather than personalities, it would be fine. It’s also interesting that there don’t seem to be many female politicians who are asked to do it. That might be because of the nature of the stuff sent to women or it might be because nobody has thought of asking them. There’s also the possibility that they may have been approached had the good sense to say “no.”

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings