It is not accidental that David Davis used parliamentary privilege to name Nicola Sturgeon’s former chief of staff Liz Lloyd as the source of the leak to the Daily Record about allegations against Alex Salmond. It is not accidental that he used parliamentary privilege, so the rest of us who are not in parliament must be careful. It is also not accidental that it was David Davis. To the credit of both Salmond and Davis are friends, willing to disagree about politics but able to like each other anyway. It makes Salmond a different sort of human being to Sturgeon. It is finally not accidental that Davis spoke now after the SNP were decisively defeated at the General Election. SNP power has kept a lid on everything, but that power continues to lessen and the lid continues to rise.
History has not yet been written about the SNP’s years
in power. We still have to be careful in a way that history does not and all of
the information that one day may be available to history is not available to
us. We have advantages over history in that there are still living witnesses,
but we have disadvantages too. But if history is one day to judge the moment
when the SNP’s power began to decline it will be the moment that Nicola
Sturgeon turned on Alex Salmond.
Many independence supporters are as hostile to the SNP as I am and they have more inside knowledge and more influence over the independence movement than I ever have had. While I may attack from without. They can attack from within. By far the best Trojan horse is Wings over Scotland.
We may disagree with Mr Campbell. We may sometimes have found ourselves the object of his ire. But we must also acknowledge that he has been the SNP’s best critic for many years now, providing the rest of us with information that we would otherwise not have and frequently writing well argued articles that have done far more to undermine support for the SNP than anything I have ever written.
It was not always so. During the independence campaign of 2014 the independence movement was united. Salmond led it, Sturgeon was an able deputy. It was for this reason support for independence grew from around 25% to 45%. Now it is back to 30%.
The independence movement split partly because of dissatisfaction over the SNP’s lack of progress towards independence, partly due to the perception that the SNP was insincere and that its politicians were more interested in self-advancement than achieving its goal. But most importantly of all was the attempt by the inner circle of the SNP to remove Alex Salmond.
The SNP Titanic was able to continue sailing for the next few years, but it was already holed below the waterline. It just needed enough water to seep in through the hole for the ship to sink.
It wasn’t merely that the independence movement was split that caused this, it was the fact that it became cynical and disillusioned. Doubts began to set in. Could the SNP really have set out to frame the great hero of 2014 who took the movement closer than it had ever thought possible?
It might have been possible to believe that Sturgeon was honestly trying to right the wrongs of her predecessor due to her concerns about #MeToo, feminism and women’s rights, but the fact that Salmond was acquitted despite there being ten witnesses against him, the fact that Sturgeon was evasive and could never remember and the fact that the Scottish government was determined not to release the relevant documents made Scots on both sides of the constitutional argument begin to find the whole thing corrupt.
When we discovered that Sturgeon could not define a woman and could not keep people with penises out of women’s prisons her feminist credentials began to appear less than an adequate cause for her going after Salmond. So we looked for other reasons.
If Nicola Sturgeon used the power of the Scottish government and the civil service to attempt to unjustly convict Alex Salmond it would amount to one of the most scandalous corrupt incidents in Scottish history. It is quite clear that if Yes had won in 2014 there would have been no investigation against Salmond, nor indeed if he had remained leader of the SNP. No one attempted to have him investigated prior to the referendum.
The only thing that changed was that Nicola Sturgeon became leader and her husband Peter Murrel remained, despite Salmond’s advice, SNP chief executive. Power became concentrated with these two and some carefully chosen advisors.
Salmond lost his seat at Westminster in 2017 and suggested he might want to return to Holyrood. Sturgeon wanted to stop him.
But it’s not enough. Salmond was in no obvious way a threat to Sturgeon in 2017. Indeed he only became a threat after he was acquitted and naturally wanted to clear his name.
If there was a conspiracy against Alex Salmond where witnesses were gathered and persuaded to exaggerate, leaks were carefully made to the press because the more fronts Salmond is having to firefight on the better then it would be reasonable to assume that the conspirators feared that Salmond would stop them doing something that they otherwise could continue to do. What could that be?
There is another reason of course why independence supporters became so cynical and disillusioned with the SNP that they preferred to vote for Labour. The events of last year and the charging of Peter Murrell with embezzlement and the ongoing investigation into Sturgeon and the SNP Treasurer Colin Beattie all provided reasons for why former SNP supporters might decide that it was neither worth giving money to nor indeed voting for the SNP.
If I were an independence supporter who gave money to the supposedly ring-fenced campaign fund only to find that the money was all gone, but there was no independence, I would like everyone else have to presume that Murrell, Sturgeon and Beattie were innocent until proven guilty. I would like everyone else have to wait for the outcome of the investigation and any court cases. But I would not have to wait to lose my trust in the SNP.
Millions of independence supporters lost their trust in the SNP. They viewed it as uninterested in independence and more concerned with gathering material possessions and power than the interests of their supporters. And they were right. That is why the SNP lost all those seats.
There are two great mysteries in Scottish politics. Why did Sturgeon turn on Alex Salmond? Why did she resign?
If Sturgeon had been so concerned about Alex Salmond’s behaviour why did she not raise the issue in the years prior to the referendum. There was nothing stopping either her or anyone else from going to the police. Why wait?
But what did Alex Salmond do in the years between ceasing to be SNP leader and the leak to the Daily Record to make him such a threat that he had to be conspired against? Did Salmond’s knowledge of the party and his contacts mean that it was not safe to have him back at Holyrood where he might have been able to expose the corruption that had already started? Perhaps that is the reason.
Either Sturgeon knew that she would soon be arrested or she did not. If she did not know then why did she resign? There is no obvious explanation. But if she was told that she was soon to be arrested we can assume by the police, how can we trust the police to fairly investigate her? The police do not normally tell suspects they are about to be arrested as it gives the suspect the chance to destroy the evidence.
The leak to the Daily Record is the hinge on which
modern Scottish history turns. This is the iceberg that sinks the SNP. But we
still do not know why. We are prevented from delving too deeply by the courts
and this may be most corrupt thing about Scotland of all.
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