THEY CIRCLED LIKE SHARKS, TEETH BARED
CIRCLING each other l i ke Great Whites with briefing binders, Nicola Sturgeon and Ruth Davidson locked eyes and bared teeth. While neither took a fatal chomp out of the other, both were staking out the waters where battle will soon be joined.
The occasion was First Minister’s Questions and the subject Alex Salmond, or rather Sturgeon’s memory slip about a meeting with her former boss’s former right-hand man.
The First Minister had previously assured the Scottish parliament she first learned of allegations against her former boss in a meeting with him at her home. This week, she informed the Salmond inquiry of a ‘forgotten’ meeting with his ex- chief of staff, which she said had occurred ‘ four days earlier’, though at FMQs yesterday she gave the time lapse as, first, ‘some three days’ and, later, ‘three or four days’.
FOR a details person, Sturgeon has an unfortunate tendency to forget the most salient ones. Davidson pressed her quarry on whether it sounded ‘credible’ for her to ‘forget a meeting at which she learned for the first time of allegations of sexual misconduct being levelled at her predecessor and mentor of two decades’.
Sturgeon claimed the Salmond conversation had ‘ somehow overwritten in my mind’ the prior encounter, as though she had taped over a family wedding vi deo with an episode of Emmerdale.
The exchange that followed was t erse and awkwardly unshowy. ‘ This does not even bear the lightest scrutiny,’ the Holyrood Tory leader rejoined. ‘It is beyond belief.’
‘I sat in the dining room of my own home while he showed me what he was accused of,’ Sturgeon said. ‘I was pretty shocked and upset at the time and that is what is seared on my memory.’
Davidson pushed back. The SNP’s leader’s position was ‘absurd’, she told her, adding; ‘This is not a trivial matter. What lies at the heart of it is whether there was an abuse of power.’
She ventured that Sturgeon’s ‘sudden memory loss’ might be because ‘ she did not want evidence of her involvement as First Minister to come to light’.
‘So, now I am not conspiring against him but appear to be colluding with him again,’ the First Minister spat.
Davidson’s tenor was quietly prosecutorial and she was careful not to crack wise. Sturgeon looked ashen, even haunted.
There was, at times, something that sounded like a tremor in her voice, though i n other moments she punctuated points with the hollow half-chuckle she inherited from Salmond along with the office chair.
The SNP leader’s responses were peripatetic but her tone subdued, an uncanny combination that made the whole affair all the more unsettling.
She pivoted from protesting her blamelessness (‘ I’ve got nothing to hide in all this’) to invoking human shields (‘let’s not forget the people who lie at the heart of this matter’) to Covid (the public were ‘probably a lot more worried about the ongoing pandemic than they are about any of this’). The desperation was outstripped only by the shamelessness.
STURGEON deemed her government’s harassment protocols laudable, although she accepted the Salmond complaints process had made ‘an error in how it carried out that investigation’.
But Davidson was burrowing under her skin and she couldn’t resist swiping that, had they been raised in the Conservatives, ‘maybe these things would have been swept under the carpet’. It was a weak jab and a telling one. Sturgeon had slipped from talking about a government to a political party.
Opponents who fear she has blurred the line between the Government and the SNP will have raised an eyebrow at that.
The First Minister was at her most ardent when defending her integrity: ‘I have tried to do the right thing and I will continue to try to do the right thing because I believe that, when serious complaints are made, they should be properly investigated.’
Her inflection had taken on a quality somewhere between plaintive and resentful. She was answering Ruth Davidson’s questions but it wasn’t Ruth Davidson she was speaking to.