Wings Over Scotland

Wherever you find giants, you also find parasites, bottom-feeders and carrion. When a mighty lion dies in the jungle, tiny creeping crawling maggots and insects and bacteria feast gleefully on its corpse for many days.

Which naturally brings us to the Scottish media.

The above paragraphs of cowardly innuendo and baseless speculative smearing were penned by Severin Carrell and Libby Brooks in the Guardian on Monday. (They’re not from the ironically-headed “Appreciation” that the same two hacks wrote for Sunday’s Observer, in which they audaciously claimed that Salmond’s success was down to Nicola Sturgeon).

They sneakily imply that Salmond was guilty not only of the sexual assaults of which he was cleared in court, but also of an unspecified number of unnamed others, and make assertions of “disturbing evidence about his personal conduct” without specifying what that evidence or conduct might have been.

Naively, we’d imagined that as repulsive as those lines are – though not surprising, as Brooks has always been a keen participant in the whispering campaign from allies of Sturgeon trying to discredit the trial verdict – they were as bad as things would get.

We weren’t even close.

Kenny Farquharson of the Times has always despised Alex Salmond and anyone who defends him. He urged the imprisonment of Craig Murray for supposedly identifying some of Salmond’s false accusers, even though Farquharson himself had committed the exact same crime.

So he didn’t bother waiting for the corpse to grow cold before he got his hatchet out to hack it to pieces.

Farquharson didn’t bother to conceal his crushing disappointment that Salmond was acquitted on every charge, although nobody actually paying attention to proceedings at the trial could have been surprised.

Not a single corroborating witness to any of the 13 alleged assaults was produced – despite several of them supposedly happening at well-attended public events – nor was even a solitary piece of material evidence led. So only one verdict was credibly possible and the jury did their duty and delivered it. No reasonable observer would have been shocked, but so desperate were the Scottish press to see Salmond convicted that they couldn’t accept it.

Farquharson tries to find sinister meaning in the single “not proven” verdict, although in Scots law Not Proven is an identical verdict of acquittal to Not Guilty and the likely reason for the difference is that Salmond had admitted that SOMETHING happened between himself and that woman – albeit something trivial and consensual – whereas all the other accusations were entirely fictional.

(Farquharson also cynically repeats a widespread lie about the case. Salmond, as the media correctly recorded at the time, admitted to a “sleeping” cuddle with Woman F, not a “sleepy” one. The distinction isn’t just semantic but is actually quite a significant one – if you’re sleepy you’re awake and conscious of what you’re doing, which is not the case if you’re asleep.)

But then Farquharson really unleashes the venom.

In wretched weasel words, Farquharson opines that Salmond was really guilty, and that the jury got it SO wrong that the entire concept of jury trials for rape must be discarded. (Note that he only says the TRIAL was legitimate, not the VERDICT.)

He then lambasts Salmond for daring to seek “revenge” – others might say justice – on the conspirators who’d concocted a string of false allegations which would have put him in prison for the rest of his life, and which did cost him hundreds of thousands of pounds in unrecoverable defence costs, muddied his reputation and caused years of untold stress which we now know almost certainly hastened his untimely death.

One imagines that if the same dreadful thing happened to Kenny Farquharson, he would simply shrug it off magnanimously and get on with his life.

(Salmond in fact never attacked his accusers. He merely sought recognition and recompense through the proper legal channels for the grotesquely flawed processes which had brought him to court.)

The Times, wisely, disabled comments on the piece and swiftly hid it from view on both their Scotland and Comment pages. But Farquharson wasn’t done, and on Tuesday he launched another diatribe.

(Comments were enabled on this one, and Farquharson ironically appeared to say that he was “Here for your judicious comments, as always”.)

Liars and false accusers deserve to be insulted, at a very minimum. Indeed, what they actually deserve is to go to prison for conspiracy and perjury. But Farquharson was indignant with fury.

He opens with an attack on the findings of Lord Pentland.

But the evidence that the Scottish Government’s procedures were specifically and selectively targeted on Salmond is exhaustive, documented and laughably obvious. To this day, the rules implemented in February 2018 have never been deployed against anyone else in the six and a half years that they’ve been in place, despite Holyrood supposedly being absolutely riddled with constant sexual harassment by MSPs.

Next up, Farquharson constructs a straw man.

But absolutely nobody, not one soul on the planet, has EVER suggested that “Sturgeon should have helped [Salmond] avoid disciplinary scrutiny and evade a police investigation”, nor that the SNP should have “refused to co-operate with a criminal investigation”. Of course they shouldn’t have.

It’s simply a complete fabrication invented by Farquharson as a distraction from what actually happened, which was that the SNP instigated a criminal investigation, against the wishes of the supposed victims, to try to draw attention away from Lord Pentland’s merciless evisceration of their initial attempted stitch-up.

(Readers may ponder that perhaps the reason the complainers didn’t want to go to the police was because that would change their status from mere false accusers in a non-criminal process to potential perjurers facing possible imprisonment. Such views would of course be only speculative.)

Farquharson then moves to his final flourish: all conspiracy theories are nonsense.

It’s almost 12 years since this site noted that the entire history of humankind is a history of conspiracies, all of them rubbished as lunatic tinfoil-hat paranoia right up to the point where they’re confirmed as being completely true.

But there’s nothing at all far-fetched about the conspiracy against Salmond. It is in fact almost tediously mundane and predictable.

A woman with self-confessed impostor syndrome and a track record of undermining anyone she saw as a potential threat to her – to the extent that there was no obvious successor when she suddenly resigned as party leader and her replacements have been an imbecile and a caretaker – feared the return to frontline politics of the greatest politician in Scottish history (and not completely irrationally, either: this was, after all, a man who’d retired and made comebacks before).

So she set out to quash the possibility with what would have been ultimately a fairly harmless disciplinary stitch-up. Had it succeeded Salmond would have been shamed and nullified as a political threat, but not imprisoned. He’d have been bumped into a quiet retirement, and might even have ruefully admired her Machiavellian cunning.

But so ham-fistedly did she and her incompetent allies devise the trap that it backfired catastrophically, and in a mounting panic she arranged for her senior lieutenants – the only people who had the requisite information to do so – to escalate it to a police matter and leak it to the press.

(We suppose that Jason Allardyce and John Boothman of the Times must be among the mad conspiracy theorists.)

The police and judicial system, contrary to Farquharson’s hysterical misdirection, did not require to be party to the conspiracy. They merely did their jobs – alleged crimes were reported, they investigated as they’re obliged to do, they were presented with evidence (false testimonies resulting from illegal collusion, which they had no way of knowing at that stage), and the processes of the law duly unfolded, up to and including a jury rejecting the accusations and clearing the defendant.

But Farquharson still isn’t done ramping up the rhetoric.

Farquharson happening to know some of the complainers personally manifestly does not intrinsically attest to their honesty, and nor does the fact that many women across the world HAVE been the victims of sexual assault, and nor does the genitalia they happen to possess. Women sometimes lie and men sometimes tell the truth.

But it is in no way “bravery” to collude in a conspiracy to imprison an innocent man while hiding behind the protection of anonymity, and to continue to agitate against him, through Scottish Government-funded front organisations, even after he’s been cleared. No ill consequences whatsoever have befallen any of the accusers, some of whom occupy positions of considerable wealth, status, influence and power.

Nor is it “outrageous” for an innocent man wrongly accused (or his family and friends after his death) to seek truth and justice. There is compelling prima facie evidence that at least some of the witnesses against Salmond committed perjury, and the facts of the matter should not be swept under the carpet just because the thought offends some bitter and tired old newspaper columnist jealous of an “alpha male”.

Some not-guilty verdicts can arise from sincere but conflicting interpretations of events which all parties agree occurred. But others cannot be so easily explained away, such as (for example) an accusation of attempted rape made by someone who was not even present in the building where the supposed attack took place at the time.

So by Kenny Farquharson’s reading, we must assume that the Crown Office, who are conducting an ongoing investigation into perjury with regard to the Salmond trial, are also part of the lunatic conspiracy theory, and engaged in a heinous and scandalous “insult” against the complainers.

And that Police Scotland must be part of the conspiracy-theory crowd too, given that they’re currently investigating a senior civil servant for wilfully making false statements under oath to the inquiry into why the Scottish Government’s harassment procedures failed so disastrously.

(A matter already waved haughtily away by Farquharson as “nonsense”. Perhaps the police should simply have consulted him first and saved a lot of time and trouble.)

Kenny Farquharson, in short, is not just engaging in the grotesque smearing of a dead man, but also attempting to interfere in the course of justice. He didn’t get his wish for Alex Salmond’s comeuppance and now frantically wants to shout down any attempts to establish whether Salmond was in fact the victim of a grievous injustice, because he didn’t like him, and because Salmond’s death clearly isn’t enough for him.

He blames Salmond’s “own misdeeds” for his downfall, asserting with no grounds that they were characterised by a “weakness” for “young female subordinates”.

But Salmond was found guilty of not one single “misdeed” against any such person. He was acquitted of every criminal charge, and admitted only to two entirely consensual brief incidents or encounters with other women – a matter which is the sole and exclusive preserve of Alex Salmond and his wife Moira, of whose relationship we know nothing, and certainly none of the business of some grubby low-rent columnist.

And yet despite all the above, Farquharson remarkably still isn’t the most repellent piece of disgusting, cowardly slime to be found mining cash from defaming Salmond’s memory from the safe cover of his death, because in law you cannot defame a corpse.

(That law had been reconsidered in Scotland under a consultation as recently as 2011, ironically when Salmond was First Minister, but in the end no changes were made.)

Nor was it Alan Cochrane in the Telegraph, a man possessed of such saintly decorum and decency that he once drunkenly headbutted an SNP MSP into unconsciousness at a Parliamentary reception.

Cochrane’s nasty little column merely reprised the lies in Farquharson’s, Carrell’s and Brooks’ pieces (including the sly “sleepy cuddle” misrepresentation), with the bonus of another oft-repeated falsehood – that Salmond’s defence counsel had called him a “sex pest” – and the allegation, denied even by Nicola Sturgeon, that female staff were not allowed to work alone with the then-First Minister.

Once again, Cochrane neglects to identify which women he feels are in need of a “reckoning” – for the accusers surely had their reckoning in the High Court already – or which “unhappy memories” they would be addressing. These appear to be entirely imaginary victims of unspecified and unevidenced wrongdoings which exist only in the mind of Alan Cochrane.

Nor are we referring to Carlos Alba, a “PR consultant at Carlos Alba Media”, who the Herald paid to muse about Salmond’s “darker side”, presumably on the basis of the irony of his name, because it certainly wasn’t for his piercing insight.

Alba recounts a long series of dull petty personal grudges from his time as a local newspaper hack before embarking on a lengthy tirade about the “gall” of Salmond being pleased about being cleared of all the false charges against him and yet again misrepresenting the words of Salmond’s lawyer Gordon Jackson.

What Jackson actually said was that Salmond “could have been a better man” – something which is surely true of all men, since none are perfect – NOT that he was “not a good man”, even though Alba puts those false words in quote marks.

Absurdly, Alba also suggests that the jury “didn’t believe that what Salmond was accused of amounted to criminality”. Yet for that to be true, the jury would have had to have thought that they’d been dragged into a courtroom to adjudicate on a criminal trial over things that weren’t crimes, a notion of such obviously fatuous stupidity that we shall waste no more time on it.

Nor are we even talking about the foul Marie Le Conte (a rarely-employed freelance hack whose French surname we can only guess at the translation of), who said first on Twitter and then in The New European – modestly billed as “the truth” – that the fact that he was found not guilty didn’t mean he wasn’t guilty, and that “the truth will come out now he is gone”, which presumably meant “I can tell lies about him for money now he’s gone and there’s nothing he can do about it”.

But we still haven’t reached the bottom of the barrel. For that, we must reluctantly visit the stinking sewer that is the notoriously anti-semitic far-left website Novara Media.

Because this was their take on the death of Alex Salmond.

Alert Wings readers will immediately have clocked the author of Novara’s “obituary” as Adam Ramsay, a malodorous proven liar whose idea of a good and admirable human being is the former Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre CEO Mridul Wadhwa.

And Ramsay doesn’t hang about.

Almost every word in the first two paragraphs of the piece is a lie, a smear, or both. Ramsay openly and directly says that Salmond committed numerous sexual assaults, a repulsive slur on not only Salmond but also the good men and women of the jury who – unlike Ramsay – heard all the evidence and decided that Salmond was innocent on every charge.

That was a smear too far even for Kenny Farquharson, but Ramsay – a wealthy and privileged private-school faux-revolutionary and a snivelling excuse for a man who threatened this site with a defamation suit when we shredded his lies about Wadhwa earlier this year but instantly ran away when we dared him to take us to court – knows that Novara’s audience is hungry for clickbaity outrage and he’s more than happy to spoonfeed them as much of it as they want.

He might be terrified to launch a defamation suit, but knowing that he himself is safely able to defame the dead he repeatedly reasserts all the disproven lies about Salmond, and squeezes in the now-obligatory allegation of transphobia for good measure.

There were no “victims” of “sexual predation” by Alex Salmond. It is doubtful whether any man in Scottish – and perhaps world – history has ever been subjected to a more intensive investigation and prosecution of alleged sexual misdeeds than he.

Police Scotland interviewed literally hundreds of people who had made no complaints against him whatsoever, deploying vast amounts of manpower and resources in a huge fishing expedition to try to assemble a dossier that would sufficiently inflate the charge sheet against him via the extremely dubious Moorov Doctrine.

(Most victims of actual rape do not benefit from even a fraction of such efforts.)

And at the end of that months-long process, they’d come up with… that he might have jokingly “pinged” someone’s curly hair in a lift, in front of other people, and opened a bottle of mineral water in a car.

And even on such absurdities, Salmond was cleared.

But all of these things are mere facts, and facts are the most trivial of impediments to tiny loathsome reptiles like Kenny Farquharson, Alan Cochrane and Adam Ramsay. Protected by multiple layers of privilege and impunity, they spew their rancid, jealous, impotent invective against a man whose achievements dwarf theirs a thousand times over, knowing that finally he can’t answer back.

None of them, to be frank, are fit to lick dogpiss from a photocopy of a picture of Alex Salmond’s shadow, and none of them should ever again be tolerated in the company of any decent human being. Scotland is shamed and disgraced and belittled by their very presence, and in the absence of Salmond’s the injury is all the more acute.

Scotland will mourn for Alex Salmond, and his name will be written in its history for centuries. Pygmies like Farquharson, Cochrane and Ramsay will be forgotten before the publications they write for are lining cat-litter trays and budgie cages at the end of the day in the homes of the microscopic numbers of people who still buy or read them.

And like poor wretched Ephialtes of Trachis, we hope they live an eternity to see it.