Sturgeon doth protest too much, me thinks

I couldn’t believe it when Nicola Sturgeon called for the resignation of Alistair Carmichael, the former Scottish Secretary, over his role in the leaked memo affair.

As readers will recall, the Daily Telegraph published a confidential document during the election campaign that purported to be an account of a conversation between Sturgeon and Sylvie Bermann, the French ambassador, in which Sturgeon said she’d prefer David Cameron to Ed Miliband as Prime Minister. Carmichael has now owned up to leaking the document, which originated in the Scottish Office, but this isn’t the cause of Sturgeon’s outrage. No, Carmichael’s sin was denying all knowledge of the leak when asked about it at the time. For this, apparently, he should ‘consider his position’.

Politicians pretend to be shocked by each other’s behaviour all the time, but this is a particularly shameless example. There’s more than a smidgen of cold calculation behind the white heat of Sturgeon’s indignation. The reason she singled out Carmichael’s alleged dishonesty, rather than his breach of confidentiality, is because she doesn’t want anyone to focus on the substance of the memo. Why? Because it was almost certainly an accurate account of what she said to the French ambassador. More fundamentally, it’s hypocritical of the SNP leader to complain about duplicity, given her party’s conduct in the run-up to the referendum.

I’m thinking of Alex Salmond in particular. On almost every critical point raised during the debate about Scotland’s future, Salmond was deliberately misleading. I’m not just thinking of his claim that he’d received legal advice reassuring him that an independent Scotland wouldn’t need to reapply for membership of the European Union. When the Information Commissioner ordered the Scottish government to respond to an FOI request to disclose the advice it had received, Salmond’s ministers spent £19,452.92