There is a circle in the middle of a graveyard with a small
rock in the centre. Alex Salmond stands with a gun in the final gunfight, but
this is not a duel, but rather a three-way fight. A third of the way round the circle
stands Nicola Sturgeon and after that I stand. It has been a long journey to
this point, but now the secret that we have all been trying to find sits under
that rock at the centre, but to get there we have to go through each other.
Scottish politics has become truel or a duel with
three participants. Salmond and Sturgeon began their search for the gold as
allies, but each has betrayed the other. The treasure lies buried in a grave,
but which one. No one has all of the information needed to find it. Salmond knew
where the graveyard was, Sturgeon thought she knew the name of the grave. She thought
the name was Alex Salmond, but when they dug in that grave, they found it to be
empty. She wonders if the name on the grave instead was Nicola Sturgeon.
We face each other across the circle. Sturgeon and
Salmond are still allies about independence. I want to stop them. But for the
moment I am hoping that he can defeat her. If only he can reveal her secret,
then neither of them would get the gold, because I would be there to claim it.
But what if they should shoot the only opponent of independence in the circle rather
than each other? And who do I shoot.
I have lost track of the convoluted tale of Salmond
and Sturgeon on many occasions since I first heard about it. The problem is
that I am an outsider. I don’t know any of the participants. The story is incestuous.
Only the SNP is involved. But now it has become a fratricidal civil war with
former friends and lovers turning on each other. Each side represented by a figure
in the graveyard.
Peter Murrell’s evidence under oath appears to
contradict his previous evidence under oath. There is a word for this beginning
with P, but the police were long ago centralised in Scotland and anyway
everyone in Scotland judges everything by their stance on independence. The SNP
members of the Salmond Inquiry don’t ask any difficult questions to Mr Murrell.
Only the Pro UK members really want to find out the truth. There are no Salmond
supporters inside the Inquiry. But if an Inquiry can be influenced, then clearly
so can a court case. So, what is the likelihood that anything bad will happen
to Mr Murrell? Perhaps this is why he is not much bothered by what if anything
might be under the rock.
The outsider looking on discovers that £76,000 was
spent on five civil service witnesses so that they could forget what they saw
or heard. How much was spent on Mr Murrell’s testimony or was he able to learn how
to give contradictory answers for free?
Mr Salmond failed to appear before the Inquiry because
the evidence he wished to submit, which was freely available to all who wanted
to read it, could not be published by the Committee of Inquiry. So while Mr
Murrell is allowed to give contradictory evidence and five civil servants are
allowed the services of lawyers paid for from public money to say as little as
possible, Mr Salmond is not allowed to tell the Inquiry what he has already told the world and what the Inquiry
has no doubt read along with everyone else. If this is the way truth is
uncovered in an Inquiry in Scotland is it any wonder that Mr Salmond is resorting
to a Mexican standoff?
Immediately after Mr Murrell’s evidence, we discover from
the woman who Mr Murrell exchanged conspiratorial texts with Sue Ruddick, that
Alex Salmond had physically assaulted her in 2008. Later Anne Harvey someone
who has been active in the SNP since 1974 claimed that she was the only witness
to the alleged event and that it amounted to Salmond brushing past Ruddick.
Was it pure chance that Ruddick chose that precise moment
to reveal the 2008 assault? If I had been physically assaulted by a man in
2008, not that I can remember anything at all about 2008, I would have gone to
the police rather earlier, perhaps while I still had the bruises. Waiting
upwards of twelve years makes it rather tricky for the police to prove what happened
one way or the other.
But this is our problem. The three-way gunfight is
such that we no longer know who to believe, because each participant has their
goal and each participant has witnesses, former friends, lovers, employees and everyone
of them has a stake in the gunfight.
The career prospects of various civil servants in
Scotland depend on Nicola Sturgeon remaining First Minister. Alex Salmond’s
supporters including anti-Semitic MP Neile Hanvey encourages a crowd funded
defamation case against fellow MP Kirsty Blackman. I look on and point my gun
at both Sturgeon and Salmond, but I wonder which one to shoot because I want
them both to lose.
But independence supporters are no longer interested
in Pro UK people like me. Their support is so high that they already think it
is safe to ignore Labour, the Lib Dems or the Conservatives. The SNP is exclusively fighting each other,
which is an odd position for a party that has yet to achieve its goal.
But as I point to one then the other, I discover
finally when I try to shoot that I don’t have any bullets. Either one of
Sturgeon or Salmond emptied my gun, just so that it would be a fair fight and
anyway because they are concentrating only on shooting each other. In the end I
remain an outsider. I don’t know what went on at a Glenrothes byelection in
2008. I was never in Bute House. Only Salmond and Sturgeon know what happened.
It means my gun is empty.
We have reached the end. The music is playing as we go
round and round the circle. The camera zooms in to the eyes of each of us. This
can only end with one or more of us down in the dust. We may reach the moment
when we reach for our guns now or in another minute, but it has gone beyond the
point where anyone is backing down. The truth is under a rock. It crawled there
when we allowed the SNP to be in charge.
