As Alex Salmond exchanged a modest elbow bump with his QC, Gordon Jackson, following his acquittal on 13 charges of sexual assault at Edinburgh’s high court, the backdrop was a desolate Royal Mile, emptied of its usual tourist bustle by the encroaching pandemic last March. The verdict in the nine-day trial of Scotland’s former first minister, who led the country to the brink of independence, ought to have dominated headlines for days: instead it was relegated within hours as a nationwide lockdown was announced. A year later, with two inquiries into the Scottish government’s handling of the initial claims of sexual harassment that led to Salmond’s trial reaching their conclusion, that sense of multiple realities remains. Here is a Holyrood committee charged with scrutinising the Scottish government’s botched handling of the complaints, continually frustrated by that government’s delayed and incomplete evidence. Here is the SNP, after a decade in power, on course to win a landslide majority in May’s election. Here is a first minister, under investigation by Ireland’s former director of public prosecutions, James Hamilton, over whether she lied to parliament about when she first knew about the allegations and breached the ministerial code by failing to report meetings with Salmond, which would require her resignation. Here is Nicola Sturgeon, whose already impressive trust ratings have soared over the past 12 months thanks to her perceived competence and humanity in handling the coronavirus pandemic: research last week by YouGov for the Times found she has a net approval rating of +21 in Scotland, compared with Salmond at -60 rating, worse even than Boris Johnson’s -54. “Of course the general public have been prioritising Covid,” says Jackie Baillie, Labour MSP and a Holyrood committee member, “and this work is difficult to explain and full of intricacies, but the institutions of government need to be held to account.” The next two weeks will see the principal actors give their evidence under oath as the committee hurries on to complete its report before the election recess begins on 25 March. Hamilton is also expected to publish his findings by then. But in the latest twist, Salmond has signalled he may not attend his long-awaited appearance this Tuesday, following a row over the committee’s refusal to publish his key submission, in which he claims Sturgeon lied to parliament and broke the ministerial code, because of legal constraints. Salmond branded the decision “farcical” and is reportedly considering holding a press conference instead. Salmond has claimed that officials close to Sturgeon and her husband, Peter Murrell, chief executive of the SNP, were involved in a conspiracy to bolster the government and police investigation, and had pushed complainants into giving evidence. In a submission to the committee last week, he branded the behaviour of the current Scottish government a disgrace, and accused the country’s most senior civil servant, Leslie Evans, of having a bias against him. The following week, it should be the turn of Sturgeon, who has had three scheduled appearances postponed. She has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and suggested the former SNP leader is angry with her because she “didn’t collude with him to make these allegations go away”. And on Monday, the day before Salmond, Murrell is to give further evidence after MSPs agreed to use compulsion powers if he refused. He is expected to be questioned about text and WhatsApp messages about the investigations, which he has previously said under oath do not exist.
Those close to Sturgeon describe her mood as bullish, after nearly two years of not being able to answer in detail the charges laid against her. A spokesperson for the first minster said that – while she accepts such scrutiny is entirely legitimate she had been subjected to “a litany of smear, innuendo and outright falsehoods” and would relish the opportunity to set the record straight. “It is obvious to any reasonable person that these conspiracy theories are an attempt to deflect, but they cause real distress and risk making it harder for women who suffer harassment to come forward in future. The first minister’s view is such nonsense should no longer be indulged.” She may well be interrogated on the charge that she lied to parliament. Sturgeon previously told the Holyrood chamber she first heard about allegations of sexual misconduct at a meeting with Salmond at her home on 2 April 2018. It has since emerged that she was told about them by his former chief of staff, Geoff Aberdein, in her office a few days before on 29 March, a meeting Sturgeon has said in written evidence she had forgotten about. Various factors had made the committee’s work frustrating, said Baillie: “The obstruction of the Scottish government in terms of delayed and redacted evidence; third parties leaking information to the media before it comes to committee; and more widely my concern that the Holyrood parliament does not have the powers to hold the executive to account.” She is especially concerned that, she argues, there has been no opportunity to judge whether the Scottish government’s sexual harassment policy is fit for purpose, because of its ongoing refusal to provide the committee with sight of its legal advice for the judicial review of the process, brought by Salmond, which found the investigation to be “unlawful” and “tainted with apparent bias” in January 2019. “They say the judicial review was conceded on a technical point about the independence of the investigating officer, but they also took legal advice on the policy itself, which would tell us whether that policy is sound for the future.” Among the SNP membership, there is a significant intersection between those who have spoken publicly in support of Salmond, those who are critical of what they consider to be a cautious leadership strategy on a second referendum, and those who have concerns about the Scottish government’s plans for transgender legal reform. The sacking of Joanna Cherry from the party’s Westminster front bench brought these tensions to the fore last week. Now Scotland, a new national membership organisation for the independence movement, was launched on Friday to create space for activists to come together beyond the current “toxic divisions”, said co-founder and former SNP MP George Kerevan. “The Salmond inquiry has clearly caused people to take sides, and there is a clash of political generations. Many people who joined the SNP post-referendum barely knew who Alex Salmond was and view him as ‘yesterday’s man’. Those pro-Salmond tend to be the old vanguard of SNP activists who campaigned for the party in the early years when the independence movement was tiny.”
There are others who question whether the irreparable rift between Salmond and Sturgeon translates into a similar split in the party. One prominent Glasgow activist explains: “Before the trial, I’d say it was 50/50 in terms of those who believed him and those who didn’t. But a year on there’s been a real shift. People are angry with him now: he had his day in court, things are going well for the party despite the pandemic, so why can’t he move on?” More widely, she says, many activists have concerns that the adversarial nature of the inquiry and its coverage will make women think twice about coming forward. Although Salmond said in his own evidence at trial that he should have been “more careful with people’s personal space”, while civil servants told the court they tried to reinforce the practice of not allowing female officials to work alone with him, since the verdicts the female complainants have been subject to relentless abuse and exposure online. Last week, a number of these women attacked the committee and the Crown Office after their private messages about the case were released to the Scottish parliament. In a statement released by Rape Crisis Scotland, the group, understood to be SNP figures, said that releasing the texts could have “grave consequences” for future reporting if people feared their private correspondence could be disclosed. (The committee is now understood to be seeking the release of further messages, which may include texts from Murrell to SNP officials). Sandy Brindley, the chief executive of Rape Crisis Scotland, told the Observer: “We should be in no doubt that this is having a very real and significant impact on many survivors across Scotland and beyond. For an issue so important to descend into game playing and political manoeuvring is so destructive and damaging”. Recent polling for YouGov found that, while a significant proportion of Scots do not believe either Salmond or Sturgeon’s accounts so far, many more believe Sturgeon. Only 13% believe Salmond has generally told the truth, compared with 50% who say he has not, while 30% say Sturgeon has generally told the truth, versus 36% who say this is not the case. Crucially, SNP voters strongly take Sturgeon’s side, with 49% believing she has generally been telling the truth, and only 13% believing she has not. These numbers are reversed for Salmond: only 14% think the former first minister has generally told the truth, while 42% disagree. Sir John Curtice, analyst and professor of politics at Strathclyde University, said Sturgeon should be more concerned about vaccine rollout. “The UK government has cottoned on to the fact that their perceived handling of the pandemic is worse than Scotland, and are clearly trying hard to politicise the issue to damage Sturgeon. For most members of the public, when they are getting the vaccine is the much more salient issue. “All the polling shows that Sturgeon is an invaluable asset to the SNP,” said Curtice. “YouGov also found that one third of people say, frankly, they don’t know who is telling the truth. She will have to give a good account of herself but she starts with the advantage that people are more likely to believe her.”