Wings Over Scotland

Word reaches us from this afternoon’s meeting of the SNP NEC that three members of the Finance & Audit Committee (ie about half of it, we believe) have resigned on the basis that they’re responsible for the party’s finances but are unable to carry out their duties as chief executive Peter Murrell refuses to give them access to the books.

We don’t yet know if it’s specifically in relation to the missing £600,000 in “ringfenced” fundraiser money that was supposed to have been earmarked for use in a second independence referendum campaign but which cannot be identified in the records of a party whose last published accounts showed only £97,000 in the bank.

(The SNP infamously claimed it was “woven through” the figures. Wings has received no reply to the letter we sent on behalf of some concerned members to party treasurer Douglas Chapman on the subject more than two months ago.)

We gather that the three are Frank Ross (a qualified chartered accountant and current Lord Provost of Edinburgh Council), Livingston company director Cynthia Guthrie and the Mid Scotland & Fife NEC member Allison Graham.

We’ll bring you more on this breaking story as we get it.

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When Nicola Sturgeon is finally held to account for the charred, twisted and shattered ruins that she’s made of Scottish political and civic society in her desperate attempts to save her own neck, the complete discrediting of ostensible support organisations for victims of rape will be near the very top of the charge sheet.

But before we talk about that you really need to read this.

Because if you live in Scotland you can only rationally be one of two things at this moment in history: (a) terrified, or (b) an idiot.

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We’ve received information this afternoon with regard to Nicola Sturgeon’s statements at today’s FMQs, which appear to have been wholly and disturbingly dishonest.

The quote below is from an email sent today by SNP communications chief Murray Foote, briefing ministers and MSPs on the official Scottish Government line, which is what the First Minister told the chamber in response to a question from Ruth Davidson.

We pass the true facts on to you below.

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The Dunlop Review into the Scottish Government’s conduct of an investigation of false harassment allegations against Alex Salmond was published today. It is an extremely damning report, which basically boils down to “You got absolutely everything possible wrong, never do anything that way again, you incompetent idiots”.

You can check out the whole 78-page document here, but we’ve included its 10 key recommendations as to how such investigations should be carried out in future, along with a note of whether these recommendations were followed in the Salmond case.

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…simply don’t ask the question.

And the problem will magically go away.

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…appear to be about to roll over Leslie Evans.

Which in itself raises some extremely serious questions about the judgement of the First Minister who extended Evans’ contract by two years in January 2020, long after she’d known about the series of disastrous and costly blunders Evans had made in the Salmond investigation.

But that’s not even the real story.

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Someone forwarded a Freedom Of Information response to us today. It’s frighteningly illustrative of the kind of Scotland that the SNP are bringing into being.

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We’re sure most alert readers will by now have seen the purported “leak” of the actual results of the SNP’s mystery-shrouded regional list selections. While the figures are highly believable, we haven’t yet been able to obtain any corroboration for them being anything other than a plausible hoax.

The SNP has of course denied them, but they also denied our recent leak from the party’s draft manifesto and we know for sure that that was real. The trouble with lying all the time is that nobody believes you even if you occasionally tell the the truth.

Of course, there would be an easy way to prove the numbers were a fake – release the real ones, which is in any case the most fundamental element of transparency in a democratic election. And whatever they are could hardly be any more embarrassing than the rumours, which have candidates topping the list (and likely to get seats) on a shocking 2.4% of the vote.

Heavens, even Annie Wells managed 8.6%.

But there’s a much more important reason the SNP will never release the real results.

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There’s a strange new affliction affecting the SNP: fear of figures.

Now, we should say that we don’t believe for even a second that the SNP has actually had 10,000 new members in the last two days. It’s ridiculous to the point of insulting. But purely for the sake of argument, let’s imagine it was true.

Why would you say it like that?

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Like an old man getting up for the fourth time in the middle of the night, the Scottish Government has squeezed out another little dribble of its legal advice in respect of the conduct of its shambolic investigation into false allegations against Alex Salmond.

And to push that gross analogy to its outermost limit, it must have found releasing one of the documents in particular as painful as passing a rather large kidney stone.

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We’re only two-thirds of the way through Nicola Sturgeon’s evidence to the Fabiani inquiry, and there’s probably not much point in expressing our opinion on it because you could almost certainly have guessed what it was going to be. The First Minister has been disingenuous, evasive, defensive and at times outright dishonest.

But although we were expecting all of that, this truly shocked us:

That’s the First Minister flatly stating, under oath, that even now she doesn’t know who all the complainers are. And readers can make their own minds up about how credible a claim that is. But I can tell you this:

I know who they all are.

Craig Murray knows who they all are.

Every journalist who covered the trial knows who they all are.

(And we can reasonably assume their editors also know who they all are.)

In fact pretty much everyone who’s in any way connected to Scottish politics knows the identity of every single one of these women. If you’re willing to believe that we all do but Nicola Sturgeon doesn’t, well, fair enough. But also, I’m a Nigerian prince and I’d like to pass several million pounds through your bank account. Please get in touch.

We just put up a post, readers, but we’ve pulled it again because this has happened:

Because of this:

More as we get it, but this would seem to be an extraordinary move from the Tories if they weren’t pretty confident they had the backing of the other opposition parties. At a minimum it’s quite the scene-setter for tomorrow’s appearance of the First Minister in front of the Fabiani committee. We presume we don’t need to tell you to stay tuned.

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