He’ll Be Back

How Alex Salmond outlasted the “conspirators” in the SNP who tried to have him jailed

It was three years ago this week that Alex Salmond bumped elbows with his council, Gordon Jackson QC,  as he walked from Edinburgh’s High Court a free man. He had just beaten thirteen criminal charges including attempted rape and sexual assault - charges levelled by senior female members of the Scottish National Party and the Scottish government.  His acquittal infuriated Nicola Sturgeon and her aides,  split the SNP and began the internal civil war that ultimately ended only with her resignation last month.

For the former First Minister of Scotland it was the end of a struggle that began in October 2017 when Nicola Sturgeon, inspired by the online #metoo movement, ordered her staff to create a new and retrospective investigation into allegations of sexual impropriety by government ministers. Her predecessor as FM, Alex Salmond, was the first target of this new inquisition. Complaints made years previously, that had apparently been resolved to the satisfaction of the complainants, were reopened. Later, as his conduct became a police matter, the party hierarchy was trawled for complaints against the former FM no matter how trivial.

Salmond’s original criminal charge sheet, presented to him on January 23, 2019, at Dalkeith police station, included “culpable and reckless conduct” for opening a bottle of sparkling water in his ministerial car. Other charges involved “touching while clothed” and what would be regarded by many people as social kissing. But he also faced two charges of attempted rape and other more serious accusations of sexual assault.

At 66 years of age, Alex Salmond could have gone to prison for the rest of his life. But all 13 charges were thrown out by a female-dominated jury under the guidance of a female judge, Lady Dorrian, to the evident dismay of Salmond’s detractors in the SNP and the media who thought they had seen the end of him.

So had Nicola Sturgeon his protege and the politician who had succeeded him as First Minister in 2014. It remains a mystery to many in the SNP just why Nicola Sturgeon, who had always insisted before 2017 that Salmond “hadn’t a sexist bone in his body”, condoned this extraordinary and ultimately disastrous campaign to imprison the man she had worked with closely for over a decade.  She later claimed that the allegations once revealed to her made her feel “physically sick”.

Many of her closest advisers at the time including her aide of over a decade, Noel Dolan, thought the exercise was a miscarriage of justice and called for the resignation of the Permanent Secretary, Leslie Evans, who had been responsible for the star chamber that initially accused Salmond. The affair consumed the energies the Scottish government, Police Scotland and any number of Party luminaries and legal advisers for years.  It led to the longest parliamentary inquiry in Holyrood’s history.

But they never got their man. As Nicola Sturgeon and her allies fade into history Alex Salmond is sensing that his moment may have come again.  In last week’s clear out of SNP HQ, many of the people Salmond claims organised his persecution have left the party in disgrace including the man he accused of orchestrating the “conspiracy”: Chief Executive Peter Murrell.

As Murrell’s wife Nicola Sturgeon bade parliament a fond farewell on Thursday you could almost hear Alex Salmond’s famous belly laugh echoing around Holyrood. For as I will explain, he is now the last man standing.