WHAT TACTICS WILL WE SEE?

WHAT TACTICS WILL WE SEE?

I think we can be certain of one thing. Nicola will be good. She has always been a skilled communicator so facing the Inquiry should present few problems. I have seen nothing in the quality of those firing the questions to give her any great level of concern. There is no sign of any budding Perry Mason’s or Rumpole’s of the Bailey at Holyrood, more the pity. The best we have is Jackie Baillie, how it pains me to write that!  Nicola has her SNP stooges to throw up the open goals as required, straight from the script she wrote for them. Harsh? I don’t think so, they were all reading from a script while questioning Alex Salmond last week, I expect the same today, with gentler, friendly questions proffered. Anyway, having spent a huge amount of money on having the other witnesses coached on their responses it would be silly to not assume the remainder of the budget has been spent on bringing Nicola up to speed. She is both a qualified lawyer and a very experienced politician so I will be stunned if we witness any serious gaffe.

No, I think the real interest will be in the credibility of the story she seeks to tell. It is here I expect the mistakes and problems to occur. Nicola is very stubborn, it is both a strength and a weakness, she resists changing her narrative, she determines a line then sticks to it come hell or high water. She surrounds herself with folk who are easily dominated by this determination and who are intimidated and scared to tell her things are not as they were , that events have moved on. Other opinions have formed in light of a wealth of evidence that was not apparent at the start. Does Nicola realise? Has anyone dared tell her?

Looking back over even a few months her supporters were still in denial that there was any plot against Alex Salmond. As the evidence that there was a plot piled up, more and more moved to a new position of acceptance of the plot, but the defence became “now is not the time” we must not risk a majority in May. Just keep quiet, we can deal with the corruption and dishonesty after the election. Even that position continued to weaken as folk realised sweeping it under the carpet would never work as the MSM suddenly started showing the interest that had always been there,  but which they had to start commenting about earlier than they had planned, as public interest increased. 

They would have preferred to leave it to the start of April but events forced them to move earlier than they had wanted. All the time the same people who were calling to leave it to after the election were the same people who resisted dealing with all this after the end of the criminal trial, well away from the 2021 election. They had been scathing against those of us who pointed out two things, firstly this would never go away until it was dealt with properly, and secondly the longer it was delayed the effect was to hand the timing of the revelations to the opposition. Exactly as has happened. This whole thing could and should have been completed in 2020. 

Now, if I was asking the questions, I would start with Leslie Evans role in all this. Either she was acting against the FM’s best interests and keeping her in the dark about the plot to get Salmond, in itself that should be a sacking offence, given its botched handling and the enormous cost to the taxpayer,  or she was working in tandem with a FM intent is disguising her involvement. Giving her a two year extension to her contract suggests the latter rather than the former.

I would ask about the role of Geoff Aberdein in all this and was she disappointed that the evidence we all read in the Sunday Times at the weekend had been banned from being produced at the Inquiry. Did she think the 60 times evidence had either been redacted in documents or banned completely by her Government and the Crown Office from being in evidence, help or hinder the Inquiry in its search for the truth?

What was in the Legal Advice that was supposed to have been released but which subsequently became only a partial release? Is it sufficiently important to risk losing her Deputy First Minister in a vote of no confidence just to keep it secret? Has she set a ceiling on how many others must be sacrificed to save her skin? Was she embarrassed to be hiding behind the identities of the two complainants when if it hadn’t been for Alex Salmond’s lawyers acting to protect their identities, after her own legal team had failed to attend the court when they should have, their names would have already become public. Was it not ridiculous to now use them as the excuse for even further redactions, the more so, when what redactions being made did not mention them in any of the passages?

Now I think Nicola does have a huge problem. Sticking to the line that still seemed to be dominating the week before Alex gave his evidence that there was no plot, no conspiracy, and this is all because of Alex Salmond’s ego is not going to wash. It would be a big mistake. The public, or at least a big proportion of them, now believe there was a plot, a conspiracy. What they will be watching is to find out whether it was Nicola’s plot or was it others around her who devised this without her knowledge and support? It is a huge problem. To protect herself she will need to sacrifice others, not least her Permanent Secretary Leslie Evans, who is at the very centre of events, deeply embroiled in everything that went wrong, the main reasons the Government had to collapse the Judicial Review to avoid risk of further exposure and which attracted such condemnation from the judge. The judge was also very critical of the Government’s actions and awarded a very high level of costs to Alex Salmond, a much higher percentage of costs than would normally have been expected.

Her husband, whose evidence directly contradicted her own and which contains more holes than a colander, especially his story that Alex was just dropping in for a cuppa, when he lives over two hundred miles away. That’s one for the magpie’s Peter! Garden leave beckons surely?

The original plotters must be paranoid, it must have been great fun for them when Alex Salmond was the sole victim, not so funny now as it rebounds on Nicola and it threatens the SNP fortunes in a crucial election, all because of their wreckless and evil actions. I hope they are forced to watch the day’s events and recognise and be ashamed of their part in it.

I suspect a lot of people would have a lot to say if they ever found out who they are? I will be back tomorrow with my take on how it all went.

This has been the most difficult article to write, every minute it seems more and more documents are being released, more statements issued. Unfortunately for Nicola all confirming Alex’s evidence, the legal advice clearly warning that the case was unlikely to be successful, a devastating memo from their external legal advisors accusing the .SG of concealment, of deceiving both Alex Salmond’s lawyers and her own external legal team. Statements from Kevin Pringle and Duncan Hamilton confirming Geoff Aberdein’s evidence that the name of one of the complainants was advised to him and that Nicola knew all about the charges before the 2nd April. It is difficult to imagine it could get worse, but it will if the content of the WhatsApp messages are made public. At the start of this article I thought it might be bad for Nicola, as I consider what has been delivered late on I think she is going to have to pull off a miracle to survive. We will see! How she must wish this unnecessary unpardonable folly had never been started.

I am, as always

Yours for Scotland.

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