The real winner on O'Donnell's report card approach, though, is Nicola Sturgeon, who exudes competence, scores strongly on shared values (as long as you are a Scot), and who, having shaken off the earlier pejorative "nippy sweetie" tag of which David Torrance writes in his new biography, is nowadays is making a serious effort to come over as likeable.
Entitled New York Fantasy, this was a shamelessly sentimental, sepia-hued vision of New York style, referencing the kind of clothes one would expect in a 1970s Woody Allen film: chunky tweed jackets over pretty diaphanous dresses, mannish trousers paired with nippy leather jackets, delicate pleated dresses over thick wool tights.
Fiercely private and avowed enemy of the press, his public persona is similarly fractured: garrulous hard-nut, working-class hero, fanciable chancer, nippy sweetie.
But the cars are nippy, handle well and have a striking design, with "butterfly" doors that swing up and open.
At which point they will find they have hours and hours to spare, in the absence of ministerial red boxes, motorcades and all that tiresome striding about with a heel-click-clacking entourage of nippy, serious-faced young aides in tow.
This was in January and a bit nippy.
Globalisation is as much of a threat to lumbering giants as to smaller folk, and often a boon for the nippy little firms that create most of today's new employment and wealth.
Lauren Merkel, an MBA student at McGill University in Montreal, visits Russia and finds a complex country full of both opportunity and frustration MY FIRST impression of Russia was the same as everyone who visits in winter: even for a Canadian, it was nippy.
First, although electric cars are nippy, stylish and as easy to drive as conventional vehicles, electric motoring has some distinct disadvantages.
But no one could keep in nippy "Itzi", pictured on the left, for long.
And it's a pretty, and nippy, little car.
