‘FM used a subtle knife on Salmond’

Full analysis of 8-hour inquiry grilling by Iain Macwhirter

WHERE Alex Salmond used a legal blunderbuss, Nicola Sturgeon used a subtle knife to eviscerate the man she called her one time “bestie”. Steering one degree north of defamation throughout, she turned last week’s hearing, which was supposed to be an examination of the Scottish Government’s unlawful behaviour, into a ruthless deconstruction of Alex Salmond’s integrity.

“I’m not going to apologise for Alex Salmond,” she announced, not that anyone was expecting her to. His “deeply inappropriate behaviour to women”, she said, was at the centre of it all.

Ms Sturgeon was “almost physically sick” after she heard the nature of the allegations against her former mentor and leader.

Nor did she remember any meetings, to which lawyers testified, where a complainant’s name was leaked, potentially illegally.

She said she didn’t even know the names of all the complainants, a claim that sounds so unbelievable it must be true.

Nor did she know anything about leaks of lurid allegations to the Daily Record – leaks so detailed that they could only have come from someone very close to the investigation.

In fact, she didn’t appear to know very much at all about l’affaire Salmond.

Can’t answer that ... I didn’t know ... you tell me?

The egregious and in her own words “catastrophic” mistakes occurred below her pay grade. Yet these mistakes led the highest civil court in the land to rule that the Scottish Government she leads had been “unlawful and unfair etc.”

What she couldn’t help knowing was that the

Government’s external lawyers, led by Roddy Dunlop QC, now Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, had said they’d probably lose that case months before it reached the Court of Session.

He even threatened to walk in the end, over evidence withheld and untruths told.

But the First Minister insisted that her Lord Advocate had disagreed. James Wolffe QC thought that they should proceed with the doomed defence.

It was “all in the context of MeToo”, she said repeatedly, as if that justified everything.

There had been all those allegations of sexual harassment, by the lawyer Aamar Anwar, in the Sunday Herald. Something had to be done.

She was not going to “allow a powerful man to follow the age-old path of getting what he wants”.

Even if that was a desire to have his name cleared. After all, this was Scotland’s Harvey Weinstein moment, as journalists and commentators have repeatedly suggested. The only difference being that the former Hollywood producer,