Salmond inquiry

Sunday

Steerpike

Did the SNP leak the Salmond inquiry report?

Cast your minds back to March 2021. Back then, Britain was emerging from lockdown, the Americans were in place in Afghanistan and Thorntons still had shops. Up in Edinburgh meanwhile, the Salmond Inquiry was raging. The timely leak from a parliamentary committee which concluded that Nicola Sturgeon had misled Holyrood prompted a flurry of accusations as to who was responsible. Now though, a year on, an answer might finally be available. For Andy Wightman, then an independent Member of the Scottish Parliament, has used the one year anniversary of the leak from the committee to speak out about who he believes is responsible. Wightman was one of the nine MSPs on the

Monday

Stephen Daisley

Sturgeon’s survival now seems certain

James Hamilton’s inquiry has found that Nicola Sturgeon did not breach the ministerial code. The former Irish prosecutor, who serves as the independent adviser on the code, was tasked with reviewing the Holyrood First Minister’s actions in relation to the Alex Salmond affair. Hamilton considered four allegations: That Sturgeon’s failure to record meetings and phone conversations with Alex Salmond and others (held between March 29 and July 18, 2018) breached the code’s provisions that ‘meetings on official business should normally be arranged through Private Offices’ and ‘a private secretary or official should be present for all discussions relating to government business’. Further, that ‘if ministers meet external organisations or individuals

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley

Was the civil service compromised by the Salmond affair?

The fallout from David Davis’s intervention in the Alex Salmond affair is all about the messages. The texts which the veteran Tory says he was given by a ‘whistleblower’ contain disturbing conversations between senior SNP and Scottish Government staffers. They raise questions about party involvement in a government investigation, the alleged ‘interference’ of Nicola Sturgeon’s chief of staff, and what the First Minister knew and when. The motivations behind these exchanges will be picked over by those convinced Salmond was the victim of a conspiracy, those convinced the Scottish Government fouled up but had good intentions, and a small smattering of Scots patiently waiting for the Holyrood inquiry to put

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Nicola Sturgeon’s hostile Covid briefing

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon appeared to be in a poor mood today, after David Davis used parliamentary privilege in the Commons last night to make a series of allegations against the Scottish government over its handling of the Salmond investigation. After the ITV journalist Peter Smith asked Sturgeon about the new allegations at the Scottish government’s Covid briefing, the First Minister at first refused to answer the question at all, saying ‘I’m not having this briefing side-tracked into the latest instalment of the conspiracy theories we’ve all be hearing about for a long time’. Sturgeon then took a rather more hostile approach, saying she would only answer questions from the

Friday

Stephen Daisley

Will we ever get to the truth in the Salmond inquiry?

The Spectator’s legal action in the Alex Salmond affair has prompted the Holyrood inquiry to rethink its approach. The magazine went to court to argue the media’s right to publish and the public’s right to read evidence from Salmond which the inquiry is refusing to publish.  A redacted version has already appeared on The Spectator website. Lady Dorrian agreed yesterday to amend an order against reporting information relating to the criminal trial against Salmond, which cleared him of 13 charges of sexual assault. The Sturgeon government’s separate sexual harassment probe into the former First Minister has previously been ruled ‘unlawful’ and ‘tainted by apparent bias’ by a Scottish court. Salmond