Sowhat exactly do you have to hide, Nicola?
THERE’S something rotten at the heart of the Alex Salmond inquiry and the stench is beginning to pollute parliament. So far we’ve seen crucial evidence deleted and the head of the civil service recalled after refusing to answer questions or ‘forgetting’ what those answers might be.
Documents have been held back by the Scottish Government and others are so heavily redacted they are practically useless. The Government has refused to say how many civil servants were tasked with preparing for the judicial review into their handling of sexual assault allegations against Mr Salmond, just as they are refusing to hand over the legal advice they commissioned into the likelihood of success.
The chair of the committee has had to stop the hearings as obstruction by the Scottish Government and the SNP are such that evidence sessions were unable to continue. The committee itself has been forced to apply to the courts to get the information it needs out of Nicola Sturgeon, her ministers and officials.
All this is a long way from the lofty promise Ms Sturgeon made last year that the Salmond inquiry ‘will be able to request whatever material they want and I undertake today that we will provide whatever material they request’. Aye, right. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.
Of course, Nicola Sturgeon is not just the First Minister. She is also head of the SNP. Throughout this process, she has tried to duck questions by changing hats.
Meeting her predecessor in her home was a party matter, apparently. But not one she talked to her husband, SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, about because, in his words, ‘the nature of Nicola’s job means that when she tells me she can’t discuss something, I don’t press it’.
When former justice minister Kenny McAskill reported he’d been passed WhatsApp messages purporting to be from Mr Murrell, stating it was a ‘good time to be pressurising’ police and ‘the more fronts he [Alex Salmond] is having to firefight on, the better for all complainers’, the SNP refused to say if they were genuine or not. They simply refused to answer the question for days.
So this week I thought I’d take the question straight to Nicola Sturgeon and asked her directly at FMQs. In nearly ten years at Holyrood (and ten before that covering the place as a journalist) I have never seen her squirm quite so much.
There was hollow laughter in the chamber when she spluttered: ‘I do not think it is reasonable for me to be asked questions about things that other people might or might not have done.’ Well, up to a point. If the chief executive of the organisation you lead had proposed pressurising the police and those messages form part of the basis of an inquiry you said you’d co-operate with, you might want to check if they’re genuine? How hard is it to find time over the breakfast table when your husband is the chief executive in question?
Later, Labour’s Jackie Baillie explained how obstructive and uncooperative the Government had been and asked Nicola Sturgeon if she’d make sure – with her SNP leader’s hat on – that the party would give the committee the information it asked for.
A few hours later we found out that, rather than full cooperation, the SNP had chosen to lawyer up. The committee had dared to ask the SNP for emails and communications related directly to the case.
A few years ago, we found out that Nicola Sturgeon often used her SNP email for government business, so it was pertinent of the committee to want to see all communications related to this incident. It’s understood the response – delivered through Scotland’s biggest law firm – was a sharp no.
Something about this debacle stinks to high heaven. The longer the obstruction, obfuscation and legal hardball continues, the more people will ask what Nicola Sturgeon has to hide.