SIR JEREMY HEYWOOD, the head of the civil service, last night ordered a full-scale investigation into how a confidential document claiming Nicola Sturgeon wanted David Cameron to remain in Downing Street came to be published by The Daily Telegraph.
The Cabinet Secretary agreed to a request by the First Minister to start a “Cabinet Office-led leak inquiry” to establish how the memorandum of her conversation with Sylvie Bermann, the French Ambassador to the UK, was seen by the newspaper.
Ms Sturgeon yesterday denied that she had expressed a preference for Mr Cameron or that she had said that Labour leader Ed Miliband was “not Prime Minister material”. However, when challenged yesterday, she twice refused to say that she considered the Labour leader fit to lead the country.
The inquiry is expected to focus on the Scotland Office after Pierre-Alain Coffinier, the French consul-general in Edinburgh, admitted that he had talked “in broad terms” to a civil servant based there about a visit by the ambassador to the Scottish Parliament on February 26.
However, it is understood the March 6 memo was also passed to officials in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It was written by an experienced civil servant immediately after a telephone conversation with Mr Coffinier, who was present at Mrs Bermann’s meetings with three Scottish ministers.
Yesterday Mr Coffinier said he had told the British civil servant that Ms Sturgeon and Mrs Bermann had discussed the current political situation but he denied saying that the SNP leader had expressed a preference for Mr Cameron.
Senior UK Government sources close to the official who wrote the account told this newspaper he was an “experienced and reliable civil servant” in whom they had faith.
The contents of the memo undermined public claims made by Ms Sturgeon this week that she wanted to build a “progressive” alliance with Mr Miliband and other Left-wing parties to keep the Conservatives out of office. Mr Miliband said: “I think these are damning revelations.”
Senior party strategists believe that Ms Sturgeon really wants a Conservative Government with few or no MPs in Scotland because this would provide the most fertile political ground for a second independence referendum.
Sir Jeremy is thought to be particularly concerned at the leak allegation because of the sensitivity of its timing during one of the most finely balanced general elections of modern times.
In her first reaction to the leak, Ms Sturgeon said: “This story has already been shown to be 100 per cent untrue – having been comprehensively rejected by both the French Ambassador and Consul General.
“The real issue is how a second hand and inaccurate account of this meeting – which was not even attended by the UK government – came to be written by a UK Government civil servant and then leaked to Tory-supporting newspapers at the start of a general election campaign.”
The Scottish Government did not contest the content of the bulk of the document, which dealt with the ambassador’s meetings with Fiona Hyslop, the Scottish Culture and External Affairs Minister, and Aileen McLeod, the Climate Change Minister.