Salmond saga has opened a troubling (and very costly) Pandora’s Box

SOME of the greatest political scandals of all time have been soundtracked by the mechanical hum of the shredder.

During Watergate, incriminating documentation was destroyed, and similar tactics were used by Enron corporate fraudsters.

Shredding has been rendered obsolete by the digital age – swapped for the delete key – though some clever IT might be needed to wipe hard drives.

Donald Trump has been warned not to get rid of his many tweets – there are more than 44,000 – because they have to be preserved for national records.

And in Scotland, it seems, some emails and messages may have been irretrievably deleted that could have been of importance to the Alex Salmond misconduct probe.

That’s what we’re told by Permanent Secretary Leslie Evans, prompting criticism from MSPs tasked with examining the botched investigation into allegations against the former First Minister.

The committee convener, Nationalist MSP Linda Fabiani, said back in May that given their role in ‘scrutinising the Scottish Government’s actions, you will appreciate that this is of serious concern to committee members’.

Last week, the SNP joined calls – ultimately approved by MPs – for publication of messages sent by WhatsApp and other means between ministers and officials about a No Deal Brexit – with the party’s Commons leader Ian Blackford saying the rule book had been ‘shredded by a cult of Brexit fanboys in Number 10’.

But one wonders if messages and emails may have been sent into oblivion as it became rapidly clear that the actions of civil servants and ministers handling the Salmond case would come under forensic scrutiny.

This is despite the fact that in February, the Salmond probe committee made clear that it expected the Scottish Government to ‘ensure all hard copy and electronic documents (including emails and electronic messages) which may be relevant to the inquiry are preserved’.

This all began when Salmond took ministers to court to challenge the ham-fisted Government inquiry into his behaviour in office, and won.

Taxpayers lost out, however, to the tune of £512,000, covering Salmond’s legal fees, while an additional £118,523 was spent from the public purse on external lawyers.

Despite having a team of internal solicitors, outside expertise was sought during a dispute over what percentage of Salmond’s costs should have been paid by government, leading Labour MSP Jackie Baillie to suggest that the total bill could be heading towards £1million.

It is worth taking a moment to reflect on that sum, and what else it could have been spent on: after all, this isn’t ‘government money’; like all such expenditure, it’s drawn from that pool of collected earnings taken from our pay packets to bankroll the state in all of its costly manifestations.

Misconduct

Bear in mind that taxes also funded a near-£20,000 attempt in 2015 to hide legal advice on an independent Scotland’s membership of the EU, despite ministers knowing all the while that the advice did not exist – contrary to Salmond’s assertion that it did.

And yet there are also question marks over the way in which the Government attempted to assess and investigate the misconduct claims made against him, which as we now know was deeply flawed.

During Salmond’s judicial review, the Court of Session was told that Judith MacKinnon, the lead investigating official, had had contact with complainants over a period of weeks, which the court said had rendered the process unlawful and ‘tainted with apparent bias’.

A separate investigation will determine if Nicola Sturgeon breached the ministerial code in meetings and conversations with Salmond ahead of the judicial review.

Her repeated interaction with her former mentor, who for many Nationalists remains something of a spiritual leader, raises further questions over how the allegations against Salmond were dealt with, when they first came to light in January last year.

How much time Miss Sturgeon has devoted to preparing for the committee inquiry into this lengthy and depressing affair, in between posturing over Brexit and the deficiencies of the UK Government, is impossible to gauge.

But from the gradual disintegration of internal discipline within her increasingly factionalised party, it’s clear there is a sense of drift at the highest levels, and a growing sense that Miss Sturgeon, whatever the polls say, may not be invulnerable.

Her opponents are ready to exploit any power vacuum that should open up in coming months.

Chief among them is MP Joanna Cherry, the nonpractising QC fresh from celebrating a successful attempt to challenge the UK Government’s proroguing of Parliament, a move that has undoubtedly helped to bolster her position.

No such easy wins for Miss Sturgeon or her ailing Government: MSPs poring over the material from ‘Salmondgate’, or what remains of it, issued another rebuke to Miss Evans last week, for failing to provide them with information.

They said they had a ‘general concern’ about what she was, and was not, telling them, and that she had failed to show ‘due courtesy’. The committee also asked for assurances she would alert it ‘to any further matters’ related to its inquiry ‘before they appear in the public domain, no matter how they got there’. For its part, the Scottish Government insists it is committed to ‘fully co-operating with the committee’.

When she was appointed back in November 2014, Miss Sturgeon insisted that her Government would be ‘open, listening, accessible and decentralising’.

Even her own supporters, if they were being honest, would have to concede that – like most of her policies – this promise has proved a catastrophic failure.

Freedom of information laws are routinely abused to stymie legitimate journalistic inquiry through delays and obfuscation, while a corrosive culture of secrecy pervades the whole public sector.

Chaos

Miss Sturgeon may well be accessible when appearing at book festivals, but on any number of key issues, from the disclosure that Scotland is the drug deaths capital of the developed world to yet more evidence of the decline of state education, she has little, almost nothing, to say.

As for decentralisation, just look at the chaos of the single police force; while a recent fetish for nationalisation, from a shipyard to railways, means government has become power-hungry – often without the basic competence to make any of these policies work.

In reality, Miss Sturgeon’s administration, now grappling with the fallout from the biggest scandal to hit devolved politics, has proved a highly secretive operation from the very start.

Next year we will find out whether her Government attempted to bury inconvenient evidence relating to its bungled probe into the activities of her predecessor.

But the stain that this episode has left on public life is likely to be ineradicable, and – whether she survives in political office or not – will form an inescapable part of Miss Sturgeon’s chequered legacy.