Won’t ANYONE in this wretched government do the honourable thing?

SHortly after he became president of the United States, Harry S. truman was given a sign to place on his desk. It read: ‘the buck stops here.’

Such a simple phrase has assumed much larger importance over the years, especially for elected politicians.

truman believed that those in charge, those who are given power to wield over their citizens, had a duty to accept the responsibility when things went wrong.

His example is one that successive generations of leaders have tried to follow, even if they haven’t always succeeded.

If Nicola Sturgeon were given a similar gift, it would read: ‘What buck?’

For it is one of the most remarkable features of the Alex Salmond scandal – a scandal that has involved unminuted meetings, ignored legal advice, incompetent government inquiries and the misleading of MSPs – that no one, not a single individual anywhere, has been held responsible for any of it.

In any functional organisation, the kind of mismanagement and misinformation we have seen at Holyrood and Bute House these past few years would inevitably result in resignations or firings.

It’s not just about accountability, it’s also about allowing an organisation to learn from its mistakes and start over with new faces in the lead.

that is vital in every area of business. And it used to be vital in government and politics. But no longer. there was a time when this was not the case. Henry Mcleish, the former First Minister, fell on his own sword after he was (wrongfully) accused (by Nicola Sturgeon, no less) of fiddling his expenses.

Even though he knew he was innocent, he didn’t want to besmirch his office.

Similarly, Wendy Alexander did nothing wrong when one of her lieutenants accepted a campaign donation from someone not legally eligible to contribute. But as a woman of honour, she resigned as Scottish labour leader. those days seem a very long time ago.

It is bad enough that SNP members worship Sturgeon as some kind of perfect being, a messenger from on High, come to lead her people to the promised land of independence if only they have enough faith to touch the hem of her gown and follow her.

But now the rest of us are expected to believe the same nonsense.

In the real world, politicians of every party sometimes make mistakes. If they own up soon enough they can usually get away with an apology.

If they try to cover it up for personal or party advantage, they have to resign. And then everyone shrugs and life moves on.

But the SNP seems not to be part of the real world. Such rules and conventions are for other people, not the Nationalists.

Which is why we end up with a damaged First Minister clinging on to office anyway.

Allegations

Sturgeon’s supporters claim that the report published by James Hamilton exonerates her from the charge that she deliberately broke the ministerial code when she gave the wrong information about when she first became aware of allegations of impropriety against Salmond.

It is certainly true that Hamilton’s conclusions allowed the First Minister a much-needed sigh of relief.

But the helpful headlines didn’t tell the whole story.

Hamilton decided that when Sturgeon failed to tell parliament about a meeting with her predecessor on March 29, 2018, her omission ‘was the result of a genuine failure of recollection and was not deliberate’.

In other words, Hamilton’s conclusions were based on a personal judgment of Sturgeon’s claimed motivations, for he could not possibly know for sure whether she had a ‘failure of recollection’ and that her mistake was not deliberate unless he could see inside her mind.

We assume that however accomplished he is as a barrister, he is not telepathic.

He also decided that one of the allegations made by Salmond – and which was ferociously denied by Sturgeon – namely that someone close to her divulged the name of one of the complainants against Salmond to his own former chief of staff, was in fact true.

And he chose not to address one of the most outrageous allegations against the First Minister – that she had, in a meeting with Salmond, been asked by him to intervene on his behalf.

‘If it comes to it, I will,’ she is alleged to have responded.

But Hamilton chose to echo the First Minister’s own defence when she appeared in front of the committee of MSPs investigating the affair.

the key point, he concluded, was that Sturgeon had not, in the end, intervened as Salmond requested.

yet an offer to intervene in a police investigation, whether acted upon or not, is in itself a serious breach of ethics.

Even Hamilton’s foreword to his report leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Because of existing court orders, many of his findings were redacted.

‘I am deeply frustrated that applicable court orders will have the effect of preventing the full publication of a report which fulfils my remit and which I believe it would be in the public interest to publish,’ he wrote. He added that the redacted report ‘presents an incomplete and even at times misleading version of what happened’.

these are the same court orders which the Crown office – run by a member of Nicola Sturgeon’s own Government – have used to bully newspapers and magazines, and even the Scottish parliament itself, into removing information relating to this scandal.

then we come to the First Minister’s double standards: she welcomes a report that is seen as exonerating her, yet at the same time she launches a vicious attack on the committee of MSPs because their own conclusions, revealed yesterday, were less favourable to her than those of Hamilton.

Had one independentminded MSP on that committee agreed to toe the SNP line (as he was no doubt expected to do when he was appointed), had he ignored his own judgment and conscience and agreed a milder, less politically damaging form of words in the final report, the First Minister would have made no allegations of partisanship and cast no doubt on the abilities and professionalism of the committee members.

Damned

But instead his swing vote meant that they could dare to challenge her and her imaginative version of events. And so they were damned.

yes, those who oppose Sturgeon and the SNP were disappointed at Hamilton’s conclusions, just as her supporters welcomed them.

But it ill serves Scotland that the more fundamental questions of trust, honesty, honour and transparency are swept back under the carpet on the strength of a single report by an adviser to Sturgeon’s Government.

What Scots have seen on their tVs and in their newspapers over months is an administration that is failing, a political party that is tearing itself apart because of ancient rivalries and power struggles.

It’s not only the women who made the initial complaints against Salmond who have been let down throughout this farce, but also the people of Scotland. We have the right to expect someone somewhere to take responsibility, to accept they made a mistake and to do the honourable thing; not to pass the buck.

Alas, that is not the kind of country we are any more.

And we should change it the first opportunity we get.