Wings Over Scotland

It’s hard to know where to start with the Sunday Mail’s lead story today.

Especially if one doesn’t want sent to prison.

So we hope you’ll forgive us if we’re extra-careful.

The article contains things even we’d never read before.

The Mail has redacted some of the names, but – well, we’re not going to say any more about that. The anonymity order protecting the complainers who made the false allegations about Salmond operates in such a way that a judge can essentially imprison anyone on a whim, with no proper legal process.

(Contempt of court is not technically a criminal offence, so all the legal protections that normally apply to those accused of a crime are thrown in the bin.)

But what leaps out from the document is how much the people in the WhatsApp group loathed the greatest leader in the SNP’s history, to the point where they wanted to see him die in prison for crimes he didn’t commit.

So much so that they were willing to completely make things up.

Once again, readers, we ask you to bear in mind what we can’t tell you. While some of these messages are shocking in their own right, if we were allowed to reveal who was saying them and what those people went on to become, the idea that there WASN’T a conspiracy against Salmond, led from the very top of the SNP, would be instantly obviously farcical.

The messages published by the Mail – and the paper holds several damning ones that it has chosen, or been advised by its lawyers, NOT to publish – show a group of people who explicitly say that they DON’T think they were victims of any crime, but who nevertheless were willing to act in concert with each other in order to have Salmond imprisoned anyway.

(There must be a shorter way to say that last sentence, you’d think.)

Three of the people whose names AREN’T redacted in the Mail’s piece and which feature prominently are Peter Murrell (then CEO of the SNP), Sue Ruddick (then Chief Operating Officer of the SNP) and Ian McCann (then Compliance Officer of the SNP). Apart from Nicola Sturgeon, they were the party’s three most senior executives at the time.

It speaks volumes for the total corruption of the Scottish establishment that Nicola Sturgeon feels sufficient impunity to continue to insist, absurdly, that the three top officers of the party she led – one of whom she also shared a home and a camper van with – would for even the briefest moment have countenanced embarking on such a momentous endeavour without, at the very least, her full knowledge and backing.

And yet nor has she spoken a single word in criticism or condemnation of any of them. Not once has she suggested any of them might have “gone rogue” or exceeded their remit, even after Salmond was cleared of every single charge the WhatsApp group managed to concoct.

On the contrary, everyone associated with the conspiracy has been defended and/or rewarded by her, even when found to have acted with the most appalling incompetence and/or malice.

Nor even would revulsion at Salmond’s (imaginary) crimes serve as an explanation for the depth of animus. Because remarkably, this week Wings was contacted by a former SNP activist with this story:

“The plot against Alex Salmond had been going on since at least 2013. I was a mature student and just prior to graduation I campaigned in the Mark McDonald by-election. I’d responded to a call from Alex stating that we needed campaigners to go to Aberdeen as the seat was crucial to maintaining the majority.

I lived in Broughty Ferry at the time and was part of that branch, and told them I was available to assist in Aberdeen for a few days if needed.

I was told that Shona Robison would pick me up. She arrived in a smallish silver 4×4 and we headed off to Aberdeen. I’d never met her before, or anyone official in the SNP. We talked about a local Labour issue that had involved my university, and we talked about the people that we both knew.

Before we had got to Tealing, she said to me “What do you think about Alex Salmond?”

It was Alex Salmond that drew me in to the SNP – I hung off his every word. Then she turned around to me and said “He’s not very well liked within the party”.

I was stunned, he’d just brought the SNP to a huge victory, I remember thinking at the time “I’ve never met you before, I could be anybody”. He was First Minister, she was Minister for Sport. I remember thinking the exchange was bizarre.

Then we got to Aberdeen, Sturgeon was there. I only saw her for about 2 mins and I think she went off with Shona to campaign. I remember we arrived at a Spar opposite some tall flats in Mastrick and met up with Shona and maybe about 8-10 other campaigners having lunch. I remember Shona ate a long egg baguette.

I’m a heavy smoker but I’m conscious of the smoke, so I stood a few metres back, they were sat on some benches opposite these flats, and then she does it again to those that were sitting with her – “What do you think of Alex Salmond?”, and then the exact same line repeated that “he’s not very well liked within the party”.

I nearly choked on that cigarette, but what I noticed was that this was obviously a well-rehearsed routine.

When Alex he talked about conspiracy, this strange encounter always comes to mind, this was 2013, the SNP were on a crest of a wave, I remember thinking that Shona was a block of wood, and did she really think that she was responsible for the SNP’s current success. I’ve always seen her as glaikit and a hanger-on that was in the right position at the right time.”

[PLEASE NOTE: To the limit of Wings’ knowledge, Shona Robison had no involvement in the criminal allegations against Alex Salmond.]

It’s an astonishing story. At the time Alex Salmond had led the SNP to its first ever election victory, then to an unprecedented Holyrood majority, and then to an independence referendum, and yet one of his own ministers – a close ally and longstanding personal friend of Salmond’s deputy, who would succeed him if he fell – was touring the country dripping poison in the ears of groups of activists even as the party tried to defend its fragile Parliamentary majority.

If that was how senior SNP figures (Robison would go on to become Deputy FM after Sturgeon’s resignation, having thrown her “dear friend” under the bus when it was politically expedient) were treating Salmond when he and the SNP were the undisputed masters of all they surveyed in Scotland, it doesn’t take a massive leap to imagine how gleefully they would seize on the opportunity to stick the knife in him a few years later.

We’re not allowed to tell you all the things that are missing from the Sunday Mail story, readers. But if you’ve got any wits about you at all, it already tells you everything you need to know about how Alex Salmond was utterly betrayed and then driven into the grave not by his political enemies, but by the people around him.

And perhaps even more painfully, so was the cause of Scottish independence.