Thread by @CliveWismayer

Thread on Sturgeon/Salmond

I started following this during Salmond’s astonishing criminal trial, reading Craig Murray’s daily & highly detailed blog posts. I’ve watched some of the evidence taken by the current parliamentary enquiry & part-read Salmond’s 4th submission.

..

.. I am way behind the curve but some key stages in the saga have condensed out of the gloom. It’s way more interesting & dramatic than one might think.

2017 or thereabouts Salmond is shaping to return to Scottish politics. This is not welcomed by the SNP leadership.

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2018 2 complaints of sexual misconduct from his time as first minister surface.

Early March 2018 his chief of staff, Geoff Aberdein, unearths info about the complaints.

29 Mar 18 a meeting is set up at Sturgeon’s home.

02 Apr 18 the meeting takes place. It’s a big ..

.. deal, apparently, whether she knew the purpose of the meeting beforehand. The preponderance of evidence suggests she did.

Parallel to all this a new set of rules for handling staff complaints is dreamed up with Salmond as its intended target. Previously, there was ..

.. no way to complain about a former politician, only serving ones, under a procedure Salmond himself helped create in 2010.

At the meeting on 02 Apr Salmond asked Sturgeon to intervene & mediation was discussed. He says she agreed. She denies doing so. His version ..

.. is corroborated by two others present.

23 Aug 18 high drama this day. The Scottish govt. announces it will be making a press statement at 5 that day giving the result of the complaints. Salmond takes out an interdict (injunction) to prevent this. The same day details ..

.. are leaked to The Daily Record to circumvent the interdict.

Sturgeon was discomfited yesterday when questioned about why this leak was not referred to the police.

The complaints being upheld (I think) Salmond then launches a judicial review to quash what he claims ..

.. to have been an unfair process. In the course of spending £650,000 in costs the govt. receives negative advice from external counsel on its prospects of success, advice which the govt. suppressed until a few days ago.

The nub of the problem was the person investigating ..

.. the complaints had prior exchanges with the complainants (perhaps to encourage them to complain) resulting in apparent bias. The retrospective nature of the complaints procedure may also have been a problem.

Faced with the prospect of losing in court, the ..

.. criminal charges were launched featuring now a dozen or so complainants & a very serious allegation of attempted rape. The hope was that the JR would be put on hold. Application for a sist (stay, suspension, postponement) was considered but not sought.

The JR ..

.. was resolved in Salmond’s favour in Jan 19 with the govt. chucking in the towel. That is, it conceded the case without argument & submitted to an order for costs.

The criminal case ground on & concluded wholly in Salmond’s favour. 12 or so not guilty verdicts, 1 not ..

.. proven.

The allegations were pretty extraordinary e.g.

• attempted rape - the most serious but the evidence proved the complainant was not present at Holyrood on the specific date in question. She lied in other words.
• an after hours fumble on Salmond’s bed with ..

.. a member of staff. Both were tipsy, fully clothed & thought better of it after a few minutes. Salmond apologised. Consensual & thus not criminal.
• the playful, light touching of a woman’s hair in a lift with others present. This woman’s hair had been some kind of ..

.. running joke for a while. Or something. Anyway, pretty harmless.

Etc. Etc. the charges were mostly of this less serious nature & some were defended on the basis they weren’t even crimes.

Anyway, he resoundingly won.

Conspiracy.

Salmond expressly alleges a conspiracy ..

.. by 4 named individuals, one of them Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell, to frame him. He says there are others he is precluded from naming because he’s not allowed to make use of documents disclosed to the defence but not used in the trial. Sturgeon is pretty certainly ..

.. one of the unnamed individuals.

The documents are text messages, emails & WhatsApp messages among the conspirators discussing among other things rounding up & encouraging the complainants to, well, complain.

There has been a massive battle going on around ..

.. undisclosed material with the Crown Office issuing threats to all & sundry. It prosecuted Craig Murray for contempt over so-called ‘jigsaw’ identification (he publishes a piece of the puzzle which, when read with another piece, identifies a complainant). But it ..

.. didn’t prosecute national newspapers that published the same info.

Anyway, he awaits judgment & will surely go to prison if convicted. He’s been waiting about 5 weeks now & tweets regularly on the effect on his mental health.

The Scottish govt. has been dribbling ..

.. out documents as & when forced to do so. The committee has shown signs of weakness where documents are concerned such that the Spectator (with Andrew Neil at the forefront) had to obtain a court order to define & widen the scope of what they were ..

.. allowed to look at.

The thing is, the right of anonymity of the complainants has been abused to shroud other things in secrecy. I know this having seen the unredacted version of one of Geoff Aberdein’s statements with Crown Office redactions highlighted. The redactions ..

.. had nothing to do with complainant ID & everything to do with keeping Sturgeon out of the picture.

There’s a farcical element to all this in that some of the material the committee has declined to see is public knowledge, if I have understood correctly.

Anyway, I am ..

.. pretty sure these events could not have played out without a conspiracy & from the proximity of the conspirators to her & her own position & conduct I believe she was involved.

End

I’m adding this tweet because it attaches a damning barristers’ opinion on late & highly unwelcome developments in the judicial review. It emerges that the investigating officer (the IO) had dealings with the 2 complainants before they complained. Equally important is ..

https://twitter.com/gdi63/status/1367456330672390150

.. the fact that relevant documents evidencing this prior contact were withheld from counsel initially, causing them to misplead the government’s case.

Therefore, the IO and/or others responsible for instructing counsel knew the documents were relevant & prejudicial but ..

.. chose to suppress them.

The opinion is dated 19 Dec 18, not long before either the disposal of the JR or some other crucial interim stage. Sturgeon claimed yesterday to have been shocked at the time & to have known nothing of the impropriety in a case which she ..

.. followed & participated in.