Kenny Farquharson: There goes the neighbourhood

Looks like The Steamie is to get some new neighbours.

The SNP announced tonight that its party headquarters is moving to a swish new office block in Jackson's Close, just around the corner from the Scottish Parliament.

The new premises, in Gordon Lamb House, is directly across the road from the HQ of Scotsman Publications.

No doubt that nice Peter Murrell, the SNP chief executive, will be popping round soon to ask The Steamie for a cup of sugar.

The party is flitting early in the new year from its current base in McDonald Road - an uninspiring industrial unit near Leith Walk that has been its home for the past eight years.

It will not be missed.

Those of us with longer memories (i.e. the elderly hacks from the pre-devolution Scottish political press corps) remember the wonderful old SNP base in North Charlotte Street in a rambling suite of high-ceilinged rooms that was once a secretarial school.

Those offices were sold for a reputed £300,000 to help pay off debts the Nationalists ran up in their failed bid for power in the 1999 Scottish Parliament election.

They were subsequently converted into luxury flats. I bet the new owners can still smell Mike Russell's cigar smoke, so deeply embedded in the walls it must be from his time as the party's chief executive.