Dancing on Alex Salmond's grave does Nicola Sturgeon no favours

Times

11 hours ago

Revenge, as we all know, is a dish best served cold; retaliation is even better when your enemy is already dead and buried and can't answer back.
Nicola Sturgeon says she debated with herself over whether or not to include in her autobiography Frankly a chapter on the sexual allegations against Alex Salmond, who died last year.
No contest. Of course she was going to use this opportunity to dance on her former mentor's grave.
• Alex Salmond and the truth behind our fallout, by Nicola Sturgeon
Harsh? Not as harsh as her remarks about the former first minister of Scotland. She accuses Salmond of a concerted attempt to 'destroy' her and says he privately admitted 'the substance' of the sexual harassment charges of which he was acquitted in 2020.
Salmond isn't around to rebut all this, which is convenient. He believed, on the contrary, that there was 'a deliberate, prolonged, malicious and concerted effort amongst a range of individuals within the Scottish government and the SNP to damage my reputation, even to the extent of having me imprisoned'.
This group, known to Sturgeon, even if she didn't collude with them, made a series of extremely serious allegations which were rejected by the highest court in the land.
But the way she tells it, it was all about a big bad man trying to ruin her. She even suggests that it was Salmond who leaked the original allegations of sexual impropriety to the Daily Record in August 2018. Well, even the journalist who broke the story, the Record's political editor at the time, David Clegg, told the BBC Sunday show that this was 'not credible'.
Would Salmond have used the Labour-supporting tabloid as a conduit? The Record front page screamed 'Alex Salmond accused of 'touching woman's breasts and bum in boozy Bute House bedroom encounter''. An odd way to 'control the narrative', as Sturgeon claims. 'At a stroke,' she goes on, 'he was able to cast himself as the victim.' I don't think Record readers would have thought that.
Sturgeon says the Scottish government dropped its defence against Salmond's subsequent judicial review when they realised that the official in charge had had prior contact with the complainers. What she doesn't say is that the Scottish government was warned by its own legal adviser, Roddy Dunlop KC, in August 2018 that they hadn't a snowball's chance of winning. Yet they ploughed on right up to the moment in early 2019 when the Court of Session ruled that the process that accused Salmond was unlawful, unfair and 'tainted with apparent bias'.
Why they persevered with this hopeless case is a mystery. It led to Salmond winning £512,000 in costs and to utter humiliation for the Scottish government. Sturgeon suggests in extracts in The Sunday Times that the 'botched' process was the fault of Leslie Evans, the head of the civil service at the time. 'It was not unreasonable,' the former first minister writes, 'to say that the buck stopped with her.'
Some might argue that the buck stopped with the person who authorised the botched disciplinary process in the first place back in December 2017. This was one Nicola Sturgeon. The first minister was responding to claims by the lawyer Aamer Anwar that he had a 'catalogue of sexual harassment cases' going uninvestigated in Holyrood.
• Nicola Sturgeon: My miscarriage, sexuality and the day I was arrested
Hardly had Salmond walked out of the Court of Session after his victory in January 2019 than the police arrested him and charged him with 14 counts of attempted rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment. The timing of this is highly suggestive. Police Scotland launched their criminal investigation the previous September. Did the Scottish government expect Salmond to be arrested before the judicial review even arrived in court? Who knows?
Sturgeon writes that if Salmond's conspiracy claim was true: 'It would have required criminal collusion between them [the women accusers], senior ministers and civil servants.' What is not in doubt is that the criminal complaints came from a group of SNP politicians, party workers and Scottish government officials.
Sturgeon accepts that there was discussion among these people accusing Salmond of criminal misdeeds but denies that this amounted to collusion. It was just that 'women who considered themselves victims of his behaviour were seeking support and comfort from each other'.
It is also on record that Evans pinged a text after the judicial review debacle saying, 'Battle may be lost but not the war'. According to Sturgeon, however, there was no war; it was all about Salmond refusing to accept his guilt. She seems to think that his very defence was an act of violence against women.
'He was prepared to traumatise, time and time again, the women at the centre of it all.' So, should he not have contested these charges because the women who made them might be upset? In her Times extract, Sturgeon somehow fails even to mention that Salmond was acquitted of all the criminal charges by a female-dominated jury before a female judge, Lady Dorrian, in March 2020. Nor does she record that key complainers never wanted the police involved in the first place.
Salmond was exonerated in the eyes of the law but not in Sturgeon's. His very court victories, she suggests, were expressions of his 'animus' toward her. 'Eventually … I had to face the fact that he was determined to destroy me. I was now engaged in mortal political combat with someone I knew to be both ruthless and highly effective.'
Well, that much is true. Salmond never gave up trying to clear his name and expose his accusers. Even as he died in North Macedonia, he was pursuing a claim of 'misfeasance' against the Scottish government and apparently seeking damages of £3 million.
Salmond's family and Alba Party supporters had been considering whether or not to continue with this case. One suspects that after Sturgeon's self-pitying demolition job they'll be more determined than ever. It was 'frankly' ill-advised to launch this attack when Salmond can't give his side of the story. What was she thinking?
Everyone knows what the former first minister was like personally. His own defence counsel, Gordon Jackson KC, called him an 'objectionable bully'. But that didn't make him a criminal. Sturgeon should have left it at that. Her tendentious and self-justifying account simply revives speculation about her involvement in this dark affair. It is never a good idea to speak ill of the dead.