Wings Over Scotland

The dogged persistence of alert Wings contributor Benjamin Harrop with regard to the Hamilton inquiry has been truly heroic, and today it has borne fruit in dramatic style.

The 10-page adjudication from the Scottish Information Commissioner that you can download by clicking that image is a somewhat labyrinthine (but fascinating) read, but the upshot of it is that the Commissioner has now ordered the Scottish Government to release all of the legal advice it was given with regard to its refusal to publish the written evidence submitted to James Hamilton for his inquiry into the events around the alleged conspiracy to falsely convict Alex Salmond of sexual assaults.

(See, even that one-sentence summary was quite hard going.)

But why does that matter and what does it mean?

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The response of the Scottish media to yesterday’s momentous events in the Court Of Session has been illuminating in terms of who is and isn’t even attempting to do proper grown-up journalism, although as far as we can tell The Times is alone in having NO coverage of the hearing whatsoever.

The National’s “Politics” section has 54 stories on its main page, many of which are embarrassingly trivial, and mentioned that the hearing was taking place, but the actual outcome is in a completely different section, buried 30 stories down in the “News” category, 29 places below the return of David Jason to “Only Fools And Horses”.

The Herald has the barest skeleton of a report, while you have to turn to page 14 of the Daily Record for a similar piece that conveys the basic facts with nothing at all about the significance of the ruling, and STV News – embarrassingly – just runs an agency release despite having the estimable Colin Mackay and Bernard Ponsonby on its staff. (They also had nothing on air last night.) Maybe they were busy.

The Scottish Sun is by far the best of the print media on the subject. It first ran a extensive but very strangely-timed article that included reporting of actual events at the hearing but NOT the verdict, even though the court delivered its judgement mere moments after hearing the counsels’ submissions.

(The piece finishes “The appeal at the Court of Session is expected to last one day, with a written judgement taking weeks or months”.)

It followed up a couple of hours later with another substantial story including the reactions of the Scottish Government and the Scottish Information Commissioner (the opposing parties at the hearing). But the only actual analysis was done by the BBC.

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To the surprise of most of those watching, including ourselves, the Court Of Session delivered its judgement immediately at the end of today’s hearing, after only the most cursory of conflabs between the three august panel members.

The short version is that the Scottish Government lost, and must now comply with Wings reader Benjamin Harrop‘s FOI request regarding evidence that was supplied to independent adviser James Hamilton during his inquiry into the unlawful investigation of false allegations against Alex Salmond.

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The Scottish Government will make history tomorrow. For the first time ever since the advent of devolution 24 years ago, it will take the Scottish Information Commissioner to the Court Of Session to prevent disclosure of information.

On the bench will be the full firepower of the inner council of the Scottish judiciary. The Lord President himself, Lord Carloway, will be presiding (and presumably lording) over the hearing. Joining him on the bench will be a former Lord Advocate, Lord Boyd, and a former Solicitor General, Lord Pentland – pictured below, and of whom readers will last have heard here.

To use the legal parlance, that’s a big-boy lineup.

To present their case, the Government are fielding not one but two King’s Counsel – James Mure KC and Paul Reid KC.

This top legal talent does not come cheap and nor does a Court Of Session hearing. So what is this vital information that the Scottish Government – which as recently as May this year pledged to “ensure that we are the most transparent Government on these islands” – is trying so desperately to hide from the Scottish public, at the Scottish public’s very considerable expense?

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Alex Salmond’s spokesperson has issued the following statement this afternoon. We present it to readers unedited save for added emphasis of two sentences.

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We were reminded this week of the amount of stick we got when we wrote these words almost five years ago, right after the 2016 Holyrood election:

(The rest of our post-match analysis wasn’t too shabby either.)

But readers, we have to grudgingly admit: we’re only NEARLY always right.

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James Hamilton is either a crook, a coward or an idiot.

There is no other viable explanation for this:

There is NO DOUBT OR DISPUTE WHATSOEVER that the Scottish Parliament was misled when Nicola Sturgeon told it that the first she knew of allegations against Alex Salmond was on 2 April 2018. That is a material fact accepted by all sides, because everyone including the First Minister herself now accepts she was told on 29 March.

The question of whether Parliament was misled deliberately, or merely as the result of a vastly implausible slip of Nicola Sturgeon’s memory, is another matter entirely. But that it was misled – told something that was untrue – is not up for debate.

The Fabiani inquiry, which is stuffed with SNP stooges and has been starved of most key evidence, nevertheless still managed to observe that Parliament had been misled, although it made no judgement on whether it happened knowingly or inadvertently.

For James Hamilton, armed with far more evidence, to conclude not merely that the misleading had been accidental but that it didn’t happen at all, is a lie so barefaced as to be breathtaking, and so farcical as to defy any possibility of honest belief.

Especially as we’re not allowed to know how he arrived at that decision:

Much else in his report is bizarre. But that one paragraph alone destroys its credibility utterly and forever. And unfortunately that means that Scotland is lost. Independence is over. All is destroyed.

We had feared, as the very worst case, a fudge in which Hamilton would find, like the Holyrood committee, that Parliament had been misled but would bottle out of saying whether it had been deliberate or not. This conclusion is so utterly mad and ludicrous that it honestly never even entered our consideration as a possibility.

Readers can choose which of the three causes they find most believable, but at the end of the day it just doesn’t matter. Our country is a banana republic, a nation that North Koreans point at and laugh. To be honest, readers, if we were you we’d get out while we still could.

This isn’t quite yet a smoking gun, more of a starter’s pistol. But it’s already more than we’d expected from the Holyrood inquiry – an unambiguous statement that the First Minister misled it (and therefore Parliament) under oath.

What’s still missing at this stage is the word “knowingly”, which would turn it from a serious but non-fatal misdemeanour into a resignation offence. But nor, yet, is there any sight of the word “inadvertently”.

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The primary character trait of Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP is not listening.

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It brings us genuinely no pleasure at all to report that events in Scottish politics are panning out exactly the way we’ve been telling you they would for nearly two years.

Because this is the worst of all possible worlds.

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This tweet sums it up pretty well.

“I have no idea if it’s true, but it’s still worth celebrating.”

God help us all.

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In the end the four-hour session ran for almost exactly six hours, and Alex Salmond looked like he could have done another six standing on his head. Now, it would be only fair to acknowledge that this site was on his side before the start, but by any rational objective assessment the former First Minister delivered the performance of his life.

(We use “performance” there in the Lionel Messi sense, not the Laurence Olivier one.)

The contrast with every other witness who’s appeared before the committee was night and day. With Salmond there was no evasion, no hesitation, no forgetting, no “I’ll get back to you on that in writing”. (We recommend the Twitter feed of Scotland Speaks for some choice clips.)

Every question was answered fully, directly, fluently and immediately, without recourse to notes, and the content was never less than devastating from his opening statement to the final surprise bombshell. We were exhausted just watching it.

His words, tone and body language all absolutely radiated candour, solemnity and honesty. When the SNP members tried to trip him up on some arcane point or other, he was on them like an extremely calm hawk, methodically tearing their assertions to ribbons with the correct fact or quote at his fingertips, and ice in his veins.

Salmond came across like a man who’d been planning this day for almost a year and wasn’t going to mess it up. And he didn’t. Heavens, how he didn’t.

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