Civil servant ‘intervened to stop Salmond’

A senior civil servant intervened to stop Alex Salmond stroking a female colleague’s face, the High Court heard.

The man described how he was in a lift with his colleague and Mr Salmond when the incident happened.

He said: “We were talking as we were going down and at one point the former First Minister reached out to touch [her] hair and face. [She] shrank back and I brushed his hand away or attempted to brush his hand away.

“I think I said words to the effect ‘Stop that, behave yourself’.

“It was an instinctive reaction. It happened very quickly.”

The woman told the court the man had “batted away” Mr Salmond’s hand.

She said: “Mr Salmond said something along the lines of ‘What do you think you are doing?’”

Alex Prentice QC, prosecuting, asked how she reacted. She said: “I was utterly aghast, shocked. I felt awful. Thereafter I was extremely upset.”

Gordon Jackson QC, for Mr Salmond, put it to the man that if the former First Minister had been behaving inappropriately he had not been doing so “in some furtive corner”.

The man agreed it had happened in front of him.

The woman also told the court she had once been in the back of a car with Mr Salmond on a long journey. She had dozed off and woke to find Mr Salmond stroking her cheek.

She said: “I jumped. I got quite a fright. He said ‘I didn’t mean to startle you’.”

Mr Prentice asked if she said anything. She said: “I was too shocked and startled. I was also very conscious I was in a confined space.”

She said he had reached out again to stroke her face about 15 minutes later.

And she said if she was walkingwithmrsalmondhewould sometimes put his hand on her bottom to encourage her to go in front of him.

“It made me feel extremely uncomfortable,” she said. She estimated it had happened more than ten times in two years.

Asked if it might have been accidental, she said: “It didn’t feel that way. If someone did it inadvertently it would not happen that often.”

Mr Jackson put it to the woman there had been an occasion when she had been quite happy to walk with Mr Salmond “with your arms round each other”. She said it was more that they had their arms linked.

Mr Salmond denies a charge of sexually assaulting the woman by touching her bottom and touching and stroking her hair.