This is such a strange story.
Because even although it’s part of a transparent attempt from the Record to deflect attention from the many shocking revelations of the last few days around the Salmond affair, it’s still unusual that a newspaper would make a front-page lead out of a claim it knows it can’t provide a single scrap of evidence for.
On pain of a grisly death, we’re not allowed to tell our splendid cartoonist Chris Cairns what to draw cartoons about. Artists are funny that way. And it’s a shame, because if we were we’d have a great idea for this weekend’s toon.
Because what’s being demanded of Alex Salmond right now is extraordinary.
We’d still been scratching our heads about the sudden flood this week of Unionists all demanding the Scottish Parliament election in May be postponed, the latest example being angry old uppercase-letter-phobe Euan McColm in today’s Scotland On Sunday.
Bizarrely, the piece doesn’t even attempt to acknowledge the fact that literally dozens of countries on every inhabited continent have managed to carry on with democratic elections and referendums during the COVID-19 crisis with no significant problems, just insists that it’s something Scotland definitely can’t do.
But then we had a lightbulb moment.
There are two articles on the Spectator website today relating to last night’s breaking story about Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon. One of them readers of this site have seen already, because the Spectator has literally just cut and pasted it in its entirety from Wings (without any attribution or acknowledgement).
It’s the text of Salmond’s submission to the Hamilton inquiry, and we know they copied it from us (rather than having been leaked it independently) because of this paragraph:
As we told readers last night, that redaction was made by us – not by Salmond – as an extra precaution to prevent the possibility of one of the complainers in the criminal trial from being identified. It didn’t appear in Salmond’s actual submission, and so Wings is the only possible source for it being in the Spectator.
Stealing our story lock, stock and barrel without a credit is rather poor form from the magazine, but it’s the other piece we’re more concerned about.
Alert readers will undoubtedly have noticed a number of, to put it mildly, explosive-sounding developments this evening regarding the ongoing inquiries into the Scottish Government’s misconduct over false allegations against Alex Salmond.
Several reports have quoted extracts from the former First Minister’s submission to James Hamilton, who’s investigating the current First Minister over possible breaches of the Ministerial Code relating to the investigation of the allegations.
The submission – delivered on Mr Salmond’s birthday – has been widely leaked to the media but only selectively reported, and like others Wings has obtained a full copy.
We are advised that its contents do not contain anything which breaches or potentially breaches Lady Dorrian’s court order protecting the identities of the complainers against Mr Salmond, and as such there are no barriers to us publishing the entire document in the public interest, because its contents make some extremely grave and disturbing allegations against the current First Minister.
We therefore do so below.
Agreeing with Tom Gordon from the Herald is a position that we really don’t like to find ourselves in, readers. But we can’t find fault with a single word of this column.
We could quote almost any of it, and we recommend digesting the whole thing, but this is as good a passage to pick out as any:
For most of this site’s existence it was the Unionists who were denying the obvious realities staring them in the face. It’s a source of great discomfort to us that many on the Yes side are now picking up the habit too. But we are where we are.
Poor old Blair McDougall. He doesn’t think Scotland can do anything.
What a dismally rotten, hopeless wee province he thinks Scotland is. It must be such a miserable experience to be him, constantly ashamed of your own nationality. (Except, of course, Blair’s nationality is British, not Scottish.)
We know that the 5th of January is unusually early to be giving out annual awards, but this is going to be pretty much impossible to beat, so God bless the P&J for giving us all a chuckle in these dark times.
Let’s just quickly check on that “expert”.
There’s been a very longstanding grumble from independence supporters about the way the BBC displays its weather map, but today we saw a bit of footage from the UK general election a year ago this week that depicts the Corporation’s view of the country more truthfully than ever before. We thought we’d share it with you for fun.
Screw your eyes up a bit and you can still just about see where you are.
This week on Wings has been altogether more navel-gazey than we’re comfortable with, as various SNP MPs have mounted a series of all-out personal attacks on the site before the weekend’s crucial NEC elections.
So we’ll have a proper article for you a little later on today, but in the meantime it’d be remiss of us not to tidy up the last fragments of shrapnel, so we’ll direct you to the right of reply to Alyn Smith’s column that The National kindly gave us today:
(Sadly they chose to disable comments, we’d quite have enjoyed the reaction from the few remaining diehard leadership loyalists still posting there.)
Wings Over Scotland marked its ninth birthday earlier this month. To be honest, we totally forgot about it until someone reminded us. Normally we mark the anniversary with a small reflection and taking of stock over how things are going, but this year we couldn’t be bothered – we’d already mentioned readership stats in August.
But today in The National we found out that we were apparently dead.
But reports of our demise have been, as the saying goes, somewhat exaggerated.
As more and more information fights its way past the Scottish Government’s bouncers into the public domain, and the First Minister’s continued dogged insistence that she knew nothing about the false allegations against Alex Salmond until April 2018 looks more and more ridiculous, lots of things still aren’t clear.
One of them, of course, is who leaked the story to Davie Clegg of the Daily Record in August of that year, when the whole thing should have been confidential and passing it to the press was an unambiguously malicious and criminal act.
(The Information Commissioner’s Office investigated the leak but were sadly unable to locate any evidence. A second investigation is currently in progress.)
So let’s see what we know.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
