Implicitly I favour this case. I have heard the case that some older senior man is just tactile. But the touching only seems to involve younger female inferiors. The hand on your arm, the pat on your shoulder never happens to your male equivalents.
There is no doubt this type of man exists, and is indeed disturbingly common. There is no evidence that Salmond was or is one of them.
Bear in mind he was an MP from 1987 to 2001. He was in Westminster at a time when sexual indiscretions by MPs were in the news. He was also pretty well hated by the entire establishment. If there was anything they could have got him on at that time, they would have used it.
Not only that, longstanding SNP members can testify that this was not the case, including me. As a member of London Branch from 1992 on I was in his company on quite a number of occasions, from a big event in Portcullis House to mark St Andrew's Day one year, to various assorted small meetings, Burns Suppers, that sort of thing, also including a Peterhead branch party (don't ask) where he was sitting on the floor with everyone else including his wife and laughing and joking with everyone. Women tell each other about men to avoid in these situations. I was on the branch committee. Not only did I not see Alex Salmond do anything inappropriate (and he certainly never laid a finger on me and we were easily close enough and interacting in such a way that he could have done it), nobody else ever voiced any concerns. Also bear in mind that he was in his early forties at this time.
Jim Sillars has also commented that his late wife Margo had her finger on every pulse that was going, and if there had been any concerns about Alex Salmond having too many hands, she would have known. There were none. There is also a report from an air hostess who was involved in hostess duties for evening dinners given by her employers which included many prominent businessmen and politicians. She said some of the attendees seemed to think the hostesses were fair game and they had a grapevine and lists of men to avoid. Alex Salmond was quite often at these dinners and never appeared on these lists.
The police contacted 400 women who had been in Alex Salmond's company, going back right through this time and before. They were extremely keen to find allegations by women who were not part of the small inner ring of the present SNP clique who would make allegations against him. Nothing. Zilch. Nada.
Rolfe implies (and may be speaking the truth) that these women were outright lying. I tend to believe that AS is a bit touchy-feely, perhaps he was unaware of how uncomfortable that behaviour makes women feel. But as a leader of a 'radical' party he should have been. As a senior male politician he should have been very careful about being alone with a woman.
He himself said he could have been more careful of other people's personal space. But the sheer absence of people outside the witches' coven prepared to say that he did something criminally inappropriate - in a context where tweaking one woman's hair and leaning forward past his wife to give another woman a push in the back to hurry her up an outside staircase in rainy and windy weather were deemed to be criminally inappropriate - is striking.
However, what Rolfe writes disturbs me even more that the party leadership are involved with corruption that is affecting the judiciary. The SNP has had a tendency towards a 'one party state' where senior appointments in Quangos etc. seem to go to party members. (This may not be true, but people believe that they will be more likely to be promoted in the public sector if they are party members.) I cannot think of an equivalent case for the conservative or labour parties. Perhaps the Jeremy Thorpe or Cyril Smith cases were equivalent for the liberal party, but they were never in power at the relevant time.
I am afraid this is true, although I don't know about "affecting the judiciary". There is a great deal more to come out.
It appears that this sorry saga dates back to Alex Salmond making noises about returning to politics, apparently as a result of deep dissatisfaction with his protege Nicola Sturgeon's lack of progress towards independence and generally supine deference to Westminster. A plot was cooked up to acquire allegations of sexual misconduct to keep on file so that they could be used to deny him accreditation as an SNP candidate and threaten him with exposure if he tried to force the issue.
Potential complainers were identified, possibly starting with woman K, the only known victim of an indiscretion by Alex Salmond. He had had a bit of a cuddle with her late one night when they'd both been working late. Both recognised this should not have happened. She reported it to her line manager and Salmond issued a formal apology, which was accepted. He also offered to secure her a job on an equivalent salary in another part of the civil service where she would not have to work with him. She declined, saying she was quite happy to continue to work with him.
That incident was resurrected and dusted down, and started literally to grow arms and legs. Additional details were added that had never been part of the original narrative. The woman who had accepted the apology and had indicated she was happy to go on working with Salmond now alleged assault with intent to rape.
There was a problem that the complaints that would be required to get this off the ground were not actually admissible by the civil service rules as they stood. Leslie Evans, the Permanent Secretary and one of the central movers in this, proceeded to rewrite the rules to allow these complaints, of necessity backdating the new rules. All the while she was doing this she was in contact with the potential complainers assisting them to make their complaints compatible with the new rules she was drawing up.
I am unsure how many complaints were in the package at this stage, but I don't think it was all of them. Salmond got wind of what was happening and raised objections. The new rules denied him the chance of knowing what he was accused of or responding. They were very opaque. In the end he raised an action for judicial review in the High Court, and won.
This seems to have enraged the cabal. Within minutes of the judgement being announced Leslie Evans messaged "We have lost this battle but we will win the war!"
This was the point at which the police became involved. It appears that there was originally no intention of reporting any of this to the police. What you think of women whose reaction to being the victims of attempted rape or other sexual assaults is to keep it to themselves (indeed to go on interacting with the man with no sign of discomfort and indeed to continue to seek his political patronage) but then years later approach a political party and offer it the allegation to "keep in the drawer" in case the man tried to make a political comeback I'll leave you to decide. Similarly what you think of a political party that does exactly that, rather than advising the woman to go straight to the police is another question.
I think this is why the allegations turned out to be disprovable. They weren't meant to be tested in court. An attempted rape was alleged on an occasion when the woman could be proved not to have been present in the building at all. An alleged groping incident took place in full view of a crowd of people, some of whom were able to testify under oath that it didn't happen. An allegation of a momentary hand on the knee in a car would have required reaching across a large fixed armrest with a telephone installed in it, which would have been seen by others in the car. And the journey this was said to have happened on was only a few hundred yards. And so on.
I'm not sure how many of the eventual charges were on the table when the case was passed to the police and how many were added during the police investigation, but as I said in the end no allegations were brought relating to anyone outside the inner ring of Nicola Sturgeon's woke besties in the SNP and the civil service. That they eventually included the ringlet-tweak and the prod in the back is testament to how weak the case was. And it wasn't just the police who were trying to find more allegations - there were emails within the SNP, thinly disguised as concern for women's general safety, that were designed to smoke out more. Nothing.
Now obviously some of these incidents happened. The women weren't lying about the prod in the back or the ringlet tweak. What they were lying about is having been distressed by them at the time and regarding them as sexual assault. None of them reported more than one incident as far as I know. None of them asked Salmond to desist, or refrain from doing that again, even light-heartedly. None of them attempted to withdraw from contact with him. Some were eagerly seeking his personal involvement with their own campaigns or pet projects. They
did testify that they had reported the incidents to their line manager at the time, but the line manager was a witness for the defence and she testified that they had not complained and there were no complaints on file. (The ringlet-tweak is quite interesting because it seems that someone else present, a man who also seems to be part of the woke inner ring, protested on the woman's behalf at the time and was told "don't be daft". Apparently people were always tweaking the woman's ringlets, men and women, and she didn't seem particularly to mind. But then once she'd been drawn into the conspiracy, suddenly she was prepared to call it sexual assault after all.)
I believe they really thought that the strength of the #metoo and #believewomen hashtags, and the Harvey Weinstein affair, would compensate for the flimsy nature of the case and lead the jury to bring in a guilty verdict regardless. And judging by some of the reactions I've seen over the past two weeks, they might have been in with a chance. The new tactic is to go bleating to journalists and a rape crisis centre to get their tear-stained accounts of the personal trauma of not being believed all over the press. Simultaneously claiming to be voiceless and silenced.
Is Rolfe really a secret Unionist sowing disinformation, perhaps a mouthpiece for a MI5 cabal? The alternative I find quite scary.
ETA
To be clear I would like Rolfe to be wrong as it is a more comfortable option than Rolfe being correct; but in my heart I think Rolfe is right and I may be wrong.
There is a nest of vipers in the centre of the SNP and the Scottish government at the moment. For how long this has been influencing policy and legislation I don't know. It needs a revolution and a good clear-out and it's going to get very nasty because these people will not go quietly.
