Wark opens a window to a parallel news world
WHEN Kirsty Wark started working on her documentary about the Alex Salmond trial she was convinced it was going to be the biggest story of 2020.
For what it is worth, so did I. She happened to be sitting next to me in the Edinburgh High Court press room where the live feed of the hearing was being relayed when Salmond’s QC Gordon Jackson scornfully asked one witness: ‘You call that groping?’
Miss Wark gasped at the rank indelicacy of the question put to a woman who claimed the then First Minister had run his hands down both sides of her body past her breasts. Again, for what it is worth, so did I.
Five months on, the Newsnight doyenne’s documentary is here and, I suspect, it is a very different product to the one Miss Wark had envisioned. In the first place, there is no villain. This is no Shakespearean tale of a towering ego brought crashing down by fatal character flaws; there is no reckoning, no denouement, not even solid ground from which to view the Alex Salmond case that feels nonpartisan.
Thus, the most engaging voices here come from opposite poles of the story.
‘It’s clear to me that there was a political conspiracy against Alex Salmond,’ says Jim Sillars, one of the straightest shooters in the independence movement.
ONE of the women who testified against the former First Minister in March says: ‘With each not guilty verdict my heart stopped. Somehow, she thought, the jury would reach a different verdict on the charge relating to her. It didn’t.
In the second place, the story that was widely expected to be the most explosive of 2020 was swept off the front pages and, largely, out of the public consciousness by a global pandemic.
Even all these months later, #MeToo, Alex Salmond and civil war in the SNP pick a number and wait in line behind Covid-19 on news agendas.
Watching The Trial of Alex Salmond, then, was like a window on a parallel news world where 15 jurors still sat side by side in jury seats, where journalists still decamped to cafés to pick over the morning’s evidence.
‘Look at Alex Salmond now, in the dock, a really diminished figure,’ BBC colleague Sarah Smith comments to Miss Wark during one such debriefing.
‘The best case scenario … ’ says Miss Smith, ‘… is that he was drinking, often heavily, late at night in Bute House with women who are half his age, alone in the room with them and either consensually or not having some kind of sexual contact.’
Yes, that was the talk back then: a once towering politician humbled in the dock by a catalogue of sharp, articulate women whose #MeToo moment might actually put him behind bars.
But it is, of course, what the juries think, not journalists, that counts. And Salmond, facing formidably capable accusers, not to mention the forensic mastery of the nation’s top prosecutor Alex Prentice, QC, was cleared on every charge. In fairness to the former First Minister, a fuller exploration as to why may have been welcome.
One courtroom encounter worthy of note but neglected here was that between the prosecutor and the accused, giving evidence in his defence from the witness box. This was the QC’s domain. For all Salmond’s oratory skills, Mr Prentice would run rings around him, surely. In the event he barely landed a blow.
What emerges, then, instead of the ringside seat at the story of the year is a documentary which acts as a refresher course on the SNP’s travails as a Holyrood committee begins to hear evidence today on whether there was a conspiracy to discredit the party’s totemic figure.
It’s all here – Salmond loyalists such as former justice secretary Kenny Macaskill saying that, from what he hears, there certainly was a conspiracy; Nicola Sturgeon dismissing that as a ‘heap of nonsense’.
Sadly for the documentary, though, the real drama occurs either offstage or behind a cloak of anonymity.
At one point BBC journalist James Cook tells Miss Wark he has heard Salmond shouting at his legal team behind a closed door. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall. This documentary could never have been one.
I sympathise with Miss Wark. Like her, I watched the most compelling trial of the decade unfold day by day in that courtroom. You almost had to pinch yourself to believe what you were hearing.
Yet, for reasons beyond the presenter’s control, there were times when I almost had to pinch myself to feel compelled.
■ The Trial of Alex Salmond, last night, BBC2, 9pm.