Ex-First Minister is poised to release ‘bombshell’ defence claims

ALEX Salmond yesterday threatened to publish evidence his legal team had been barred from presenting in court.

He gave no explicit detail on the nature of the bombshell he plans to unleash. But the Mail can reveal Mr Salmond launched an extraordinary attack on former colleagues in secret court hearings, accusing them of plotting against him.

His lawyer, Gordon Jackson, QC, had lobbied judge Lady Dorrian ahead of the trial for permission to argue that Mr Salmond was the victim of a Scottish Government campaign.

Those proceedings were covered by a court order which meant their content could not be revealed until the resolution of the trial.

Mr Jackson said key SNP and civil service figures had feared a major scandal after Mr Salmond’s successful judicial review over the botched internal inquiry into allegations that he sexually harassed staff.

This victory, in January 2019, came as police continued to investigate Mr Salmond after evidence from the government probe was passed to officers. Just over a fortnight after Mr Salmond learned he had won the judicial review, he was arrested and charged.

His defence team argued ahead of the trial that this was the result of concerted efforts by

Nicola Sturgeon’s inner circle to deflect public attention away from the disastrous outcome of the court case.

The claims against him were in effect cooked up to smear Mr Salmond as a form of reprisal, and to detract from the government’s shambolic and unlawful, misconduct inquiry.

In explosive text messages read out to the court in the hearings, Mr Jackson said Permanent Secretary Leslie Evans had texted a civil servant, saying: ‘We may have lost the battle – but we will win the war.’

Mr Jackson said a ‘huge amount of material’ had been obtained from a phone which had ‘been in the possession of Susan Ruddick’, the chief executive officer of the SNP, which

contained ‘many hundreds of texts’. A minister, who cannot be named for legal reasons, texted Ms Ruddick to say they were ‘currently convening [their] SPADS [special advisers] for a council of war’.

The minister also texted that ‘Salmond isn’t going to stop until he gets [a Scottish Government employee who Mr Salmond feared was at the centre of the plot against him], and he’s bringing down Nicola Sturgeon on the way’.

Mr Jackson suggested the exchange of texts showed ‘real personal motivation’ to target Mr Salmond, because of the failure of the judicial review process. Fearing for the future of the government, and for their own personal positions, those closest to Miss Sturgeon perceived themselves to be at war with Mr Salmond.

In one pre-trial hearing, at the High Court in Edinburgh on January 22, 2020, Mr Jackto son said the Scottish Government process had been so flawed that Chief Constable Iain Livingstone refused to take a copy of its report as a starting-point for the Police Scotland investigation. Mr Jackson referred

the involvement of Miss Sturgeon’s office, although he insisted he did not ‘mean to suggest the First Minister has done anything wrong’.

People who had insisted originally that they were not the victims of crime were encouraged to contact police – ‘jumping on the bandwagon’ because of ‘political motivation’, in a bid to ‘beef up the criminal charges’, the QC alleged.

Mr Jackson said there were ‘thousands of emails’ which showed a senior Scottish Government employee was ‘very much at the centre of driving this’. That same employee was one of Mr Salmond’s accusers in the ensuing trial. He wanted to be able to pursue these lines of defence but advocate depute Alex Prentice said the Crown would ‘seek to counter’ any claim of ‘collusion’.

He said the Crown was ‘very concerned about there being a substantial amount of evidence about the judicial review’, which he said was ‘entirely irrelevant’.

Trial judge Lady Dorrian later agreed that pursuing the judicial review dimension as a line of defence would be ‘wholly irrelevant’ and could end up ‘derailing the trial’.

Now, with the trial over, the evidence Salmond’s legal team was restrained from rehearsing in court is likely to be placed in the public domain, potentially sending shockwaves through the civil service.

‘Beef up the criminal charges