The Press and Journal (Inverness, Highlands, and Islands)
SNP facing its worst split since it came to power 12 years ago
As Richard Leonard put it yesterday, there are two female civil servants who have been “let down badly” by the bungled investigation into the sexual harassment claims they made against Alex Salmond.
The Scottish Labour leader was right to draw attention to the entirely unsatisfactory manner in which Ms Sturgeon’s government conducted its inquiry and the ramifications for those who made the complaints.
But beyond that sorry state of affairs, yesterday’s revelations about the Salmond/Sturgeon saga means that it now has a political dimension that is potentially very damaging for the first minister.
The SNP is suffering from its worst split since it came into government more than a decade ago, with Mr Salmond and his acolytes pitted against the first minister and her supporters.
To complicate matters, Ms Sturgeon now finds her own conduct under serious scrutiny following her disclosure at First Minister’s Questions (FMQs) that she and her taxpayer-funded special adviser met with Mr Salmond about the complaints.
The presence of Ms Sturgeon’s chief of staff, Liz Lloyd, at the April meeting raises serious questions about the first minister’s claim that the session was to conduct SNP rather than government business.
Furthermore, as Mr Leonard was only too keen to point out at Holyrood, there are now questions over whether Ms Sturgeon broke the ministerial code governing ministers’ conduct.
Section 4.23 of the code states that significant ministers’ discussions about government business should be passed back to their private offices “as soon as possible”.
At FMQs, Ms Sturgeon admitted that she did not tell permanent secretary Leslie Evans about that meeting until she had a second meeting with Mr Salmond in June.
During one of the most bruising FMQs that the first minister has experienced during her spell in charge of the country, she was skilfully taken to task by both Mr Leonard and stand-in Scottish Tory leader Jackson Carlaw.
The bowed heads on the SNP benches were an indication of just how difficult this issue has become.
As she attempted to defend herself, Ms Sturgeon repeated the line that she did not intervene in the Scottish Government’s investigative process.
But her claims sounded hollow following her admission that she had discussed the matter with Mr Salmond on five occasions.
The first was at her Glasgow home on April 2 last year. The second was in a telephone conversation on April 23. The third time was when the pair met at SNP conference on June 7 in Aberdeen – the point at which Ms Sturgeon finally decided to inform Ms Evans about her first meeting.
The final two discussions took place firstly at her home on July 14 and in a telephone conversation on July 18.
These may seem dry, procedural matters but there are now question marks over how Ms Sturgeon’s administration is run and how she has dealt with allegations of a most serious nature.
Meanwhile, her former mentor and predecessor Mr Salmond refuses to drift off into the background.
He may have quit the SNP when the complaints against him came to light, but he still has a significant following within the party he hopes to rejoin.
His comments made in an email to supporters suggesting that “some people” were “clearly very anxious to remove me now as a political threat” may sound like a conspiracy theory too far, but in the current febrile political atmosphere they are far from helpful to Ms Sturgeon.