LondonJohn, I know you don't pay a blind bit of attention to anything I say, but you are completely off base with this. It is Sturgeon who is behind and at the centre of the split in the SNP.
Salmond's worst mistake was in nurturing a viper as his second in command and successor. However, psychopaths aren't all mad axe murderers, some are very good actors and can string people along for a long time.
As soon as she had what she wanted, the leadership, she started to turn the SNP into a cult of personality. (I have good information that her husband is believed to have sabotaged the Yes campaign in 2014 when it looked as if victory might be within grasp, because that would have left Salmond the heroic winner and Sturgeon as a perpetual Robin to his Batman. They needed the referendum lost so that he would step down and she would succeed. I don't care if you believe that or not, I don't even know if I do, but I'm told there is evidence.)
It's also common knowledge, and I don't care if you believe this either, I'm just passing it on, that Peter Murrell is as camp as a row of tents and that the Sturgeon-Murrell marriage is one of political convenience, to allow them to control the party between them. (I had to go and look up Lavender Marriage the other day as it was trending, but then I knew what it was about.) Also Sturgeon said to be in a relationship with the (female) French ambassador who was involved in the Carmichael thing a few years ago. Whether any of this is true or not, having a married couple as leader of the party and First Minister, and Chef Executive, is something that simply should never have been allowed. Three people now run the SNP, put their favourites into key positions, and so it goes.
As soon as she took over, independence went on the back burner. It wasn't obvious at first because nobody was expecting another run at it within the couple of years following 2014, but after the Brexit referendum it started to get more and more obvious. She'd rally the troops about how independence was just round the corner (and to my shame I have been among the troops she was rallying), but then there was never a clear route or a clear timetable, and such strategy as she revealed actually explicitly ruled out any course of action that might have had a chance of success.
Money that was given to a fund earmarked for fighting a future referendum has vanished. Sturgeon has become increasingly obsessed with "trans rights", intent on forcing self-ID through against the increasingly well-organised and well-argued opposition of women. Every time she's forced to give some ground in public she sneaks round the back to force it through anyway. It's quite the opposite of the independence thing. There she claims publicly to be pursuing independence, but does nothing. On self-ID she takes a back seat, lets her pawns take the lead, everyone says "it's just administrative, nothing to see here and there will be another consultation anyway" while they're actually ramming it through.
In the course of all this Salmond is said to have become increasingly alarmed, and to have begun to regret stepping down and handing the viper the controls. He made some announcement in 2018 about maybe moving back into frontline politics, and everything snowballed from there. A couple of complants of sexual harrassment were solicited (one from a jealous woman who had pursued him in the past and whom he'd had a short fling with, but he'd broken it off) with the intention of putting them on file so that if he applied to be approved as a parliamentary candidate he could be rejected.
Now considering that one of the complaints was attempted rape, this stinks. If someone really thinks she's been the victim of attempted rape it's the police she should be going to, and if for some utterly inexplicable reason she goes to her political party about it, she should then be directed to the police. You don't file something that serious in case someone wants to be vetted as a candidate, with the comment "hopefully it won't be needed".
Salmond got wind of the shenanigans (the improper new complaints process that was dreamed up for the express purpose of allowing these retrospective complaints to be considered) and eventually applied for a judicial review. The Scottish government spent an enormous amount of money fighting this but had to fold near the end as their own lawyers said they would pull out if they didn't fold, because their case was impossible to win. Coincidentally the pull-out happened just before evidence was due to be taken that could have blown the whole thing wide open.
Incensed, the conspirators then had a plan that would see them "win the war" even though they'd "lost this battle", and someone had an idea about how they could engineer "strong repercussions" while at the same time remaining anonymous. This was when the complaints were passed to the police.
The police were encouraged to mount a massive investigation, more suited to catching the Yorkshire Ripper, into Salmond. Who bear in mind had been a Westminster MP since 1987, right under the noses of a lot of people who would have brought him down any way they could, but in the midst of a lot of sex scandals at the time, nobody had anything on him. Something like 400 women were approached in a massive trawl for more complainants, specifically they were desperate to get someone who wasn't part of the wee close Sturgeon clique to complain. That was why there was so much fuss about the "killer heels" joke, because that woman wasn't one of the clique. But it had to be dropped because there was nothing in it. My friend Anne Harvey who works for the party in Westminster, and who is a lawyer, has given an affidavit about this, as she was approached to get the names of women who had worked with Salmond to try to get some of them to complain. One woman was approached by the police and asked if she wanted to make a complaint of sexual harrassment because someone had seen Salmond kiss her on the cheek when they met in a theatre foyer! She said, don't be ridiculous.
This was all said to be in pursuit of something known as the Moorov doctrine, which is that if you can find a number of examples of similar behaviour attested to by independent witnesses, that strengthens your case. But there were two things wrong with that, One is that these women weren't independent, they were all in communication and egging each other on (at one time they denied that, and then when it couldn't be denied, it was just "a support group" - but such support groups should not happen, that's what independent counselling services are for). The other was that most of the complaints were beyond trivial - a push in the back to hurry someone up, pinging someone's curly hair which was apparently a pastime indulged in my many, an alleged hand on a knee in a car, and an alleged hand on an arm or a shoulder, over clothes. These incidents don't do a lot to support an allegation of attempted rape, and indeed one might wonder why the barrel had to be scraped quite so hard. I suspect the jury wondered too.
In fact as I understand it, the thinking wasn't really Moorov at all, but to get a range of allegations in front of the jury on the reasoning that juries who were going to acquit on the serious charges might well decide to split the difference or compromise a bit and convict on one or two of the really trivial one, in which case this could be used to trash Salmond's reputation and career anyway, even though he had been acquitted of attempted rape.
That didn't work and indeed it appears that the jury saw right through it.
Now we have two inquiries, one into whether Sturgeon broke the ministerial code by lying to the parliament about the affair (spoiler, she did) and one into the squandering of some insane amount of money trying to oppose the judicial review when they hadn't a leg to stand on. Including the evidence that they concealed evidence from their own counsel, thus prolonging the process, and when counsel finally found out about it they said, fold or we'll walk, we cannot argue the case now we know the truth about what you weren't telling us.
What is going on now is a last-ditch attempt to stem the flood of revelations. Sturgeon is toast if half of what she did gets out. Salmond naturally wants the evidence he has to become public, and I know people who know him and who say he categorically has documentary proof of the whole thing, but the committee is entirely bent (three SNP MSPs plus Wightman who is a spineless wannabee seduced with promises of a nice place in the cabal if he plays along, against three opposition). They are repeatedly refusing to publish his submissions on the grounds that even mentioning the name, or I think it's now even the name of the senior position she holds, of She Who Must Not Be Named is illegal, even if she isn't in any way identified as a complainant. Since the main evidence of the stitch-up is related to meetings she attended, this is an impasse. This is of course why she added her name to the complainants list at the time, on a small exaggerated complaint, so that the anonymity extended to complainants in complaints of sexual harrassment, no matter how conclusively proved to be malicious lies, would cover her. Salmond is literally being threatened with prosecution if he mentions the name or indeed the position of someone who was central to crafting the illegal complaints procedure which is what this is all about.
I still can't be sure this will all break open as the Crown Office is frantically covering up on their behalf. And it's all compounded by the alphabet women squealing to the press about how this is all so unfair and stressful for them and it will be an outrage if any of them is identified, and anyway everyone should always believe the woman even if the man was acqutted and it's all so unfair...
So there you go. Deep-fried banana fritter republic. And I will in all probability spoil my ballot paper in May.
