Alex Salmond

The ongoing mess that has to be resolved

I’ve spent much of the past day and a bit drafting a piece on Alex Salmond, whose death last weekend was a shock though not perhaps a surprise. To be clear: I support independence for Scotland, I had a little personal contact with him thirty odd years ago when he was my constituency MP, and I admired him, not without reservation (his column for the Sun, his dallying with and perhaps manipulation of Trump, and the RT show were all issues for me) but with high respect for his turn of mind and his commitment to the cause.

But I’ve put aside what I‘ve written so far because what I’ve written in those 2115 words so far is irrelevant while the scandal which persists after his trial on sexual assault charges polarises even the response to his death.

What to say about the charges brought against him at that trial? There’s enough evidence around that Salmond’s behaviour towards women could be, if not inappropriate, at the very least reckless enough to leave him open to the malicious prosecution which many supporters allege led to it. (And let’s say here, it would not have been the only malicious prosecution carried out by the COPFS at that time if this was so.) The most compelling testimony to this I’ve read in the days following his death has been Kevin McKenna’s piece in The Herald (October 15^th), in which McKenna describes how he and others confronted Salmond on the issue in “a couple of testy conversations” once the trial was over.   There was enough belief shared amongst these people, who appear to have firmly believed in Salmond’s innocence of the charges brought, that his behaviour had been self-destructive, allowing “opportunists” within his party the opportunity to bring him down.  So ‘difficult conversations’ were had. 

But then, McKenna states, “it was done.”  Which in itself, for me, is significant. Sturgeon herself said at the time that she had not heard of any concerns around Salmond’s behaviour. More recently, yet another Police Scotland investigation has been launched, this time into the evidence given by a senior civil servant, one of four who wrote to the Holyrood enquiry into the affair to ‘clarify’ the testimony they had earlier given. The clarification offered by that person is that while under oath he had said he had heard of rumours concerning Salmond’s behaviour in Bute House, he had meant to say he had not heard them.

So there we go.

Some journalists who were clearly not supporters of Salmond have written very carefully to imply that they do not accept the verdict of the trial which acquitted him of those 13 charges. There have been comments about conspiracy theories, and some outrage that the women he was alleged in that trial to have assaulted have not had justice. Well, in one or two cases (Alan Cochrane, come on down) I’m going to have to stifle laughter at the attempts being made to present particular individuals as exemplars of moral probity. There’s also been at least one reference made to the dead man’s widow which I found to be in poor taste. All the same, it can’t be said that those pieces express a view which isn’t shared by significant numbers in Scotland and perhaps beyond.

And our position on the scandal does not necessarily need to be simply binary - entirely either for or against him. Salmond was of a generation of men whose attitudes towards women took very different forms to those held by those of us who came even a little later. There are plenty of stories around education, my own sector, of jaw-dropping behaviour towards women and girls largely by older men who had acquired the sort of apparently impregnable professional self-confidence and status I came across when I took up my first promoted post. One memorable session in the bar of a posh Glasgow hotel after a day’s exam marking saw a number of us recount stories about what some of those men did, and end each retelling with the chorus “nowadays they’d get the jail”. Reading some of the charges of which Salmond was acquitted, that malt-fuelled humour came closer to the truth than we might have seriously thought.

Nevertheless. Whatever was done, and some at least of the truth of that has now been absolutely lost, I do not believe (for reasons I’ll illustrate below) that Alex Salmond’s behaviour, however it may have been imperfect, deserved criminal sanction. Neither do I accept the characterisation of charges made by several commentators that his prosecution may have been deliberately malicious as being mere conspiracy theories: not least because of the bipartisan credentials of some making the charges. The last lengthy interview I saw Salmond give, for example, was with Fraser Nelson, then still editor of The Spectator and so absolutely not a natural ally, who referred to how his subject had been ‘fitted up’. Go tell him he’s a swivel-eyed conspiracy loon if you like. Try the same on David Davis, a Tory Brexiteer no less, who has made two Westminster speeches on what he regards as the corrupt nature of Salmond’s prosecution and has argued for three reforms to the Scotland Act (the right of parliamentary privilege, the requirement for candor from officials and the separation of the judiciary and the executive, something insisted on by Salmond as First Minister but ignored by Sturgeon and both her successors who have all included the Lord Advocate as a member of cabinet) which it is to our parliament’s lasting shame have not been insisted on from here. Finally, read the tribute published by Salmond’s lawyers, Levy & McRae, which speaks not only of of his “complete vindication”, as might be expected, but also of how “the apparatus of the state [were turned] against him”, and of “injustices still to be resolved”.

The current Scottish government, alas, has in a few quick years amassed a dreadful record of evident incompetence, not least in passing or attempting to pass bad laws, and of a willingness to alignment itself with extreme and occasionally unsavoury characters and organisations out of misplaced ideological conviction. It has also shown itself to be extraordinarily reluctant to release information even when legally required to do so. David Hamilton, our current Information Commissioner, very recently issued an extremely frank condemnation of its record in delaying or compromising the release of documentation, which is often even when released heavily redacted. James Hamilton, the senior Irish lawyer who led the inquiry into whether Nicola Sturgeon had broken the ministerial code in her account of meetings with Salmond around the first allegations made against him, expressed serious disappointment at the extensive redaction of his published report. this is a government which seeks to hide information, when it doesn’t simply neglect to keep records of the sort any serious enterprise makes as a matter of course.

Salmond’s family have the option of continuing with his civil action, for loss of earnings and reputation, against the Scottish government which has been postponed four times due to other criminal investigations against various senior SNP and government figures. I hope they do, and that the results of that case together with the final outcomes of the interminable Operation Branchform et al are known to us soon. It’s clear that the stink of the scandal around 2020’s trial will be with us, infusing itself into the governance of the country, until they are. Then we will know at least more of the truth than we do now. I will know whether my belief in Alex Salmond being innocent of criminal behaviour has been misplaced. Those continuing to traduce the man’s reputation even while his body remains on foreign soil might, equally, have their own accommodation with truth to make.