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Did the SNP leak the Salmond inquiry report?

Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Cast your minds back to March 2021. Back then, Britain was emerging from lockdown, the Americans were in place in Afghanistan and Thorntons still had shops. Up in Edinburgh meanwhile, the Salmond Inquiry was raging. The timely leak from a parliamentary committee which concluded that Nicola Sturgeon had misled Holyrood prompted a flurry of accusations as to who was responsible. Now though, a year on, an answer might finally be available.

For Andy Wightman, then an independent Member of the Scottish Parliament, has used the one year anniversary of the leak from the committee to speak out about who he believes is responsible. Wightman was one of the nine MSPs on the panel investigating the Scottish government’s handling of harassment complaints, with four being SNP members of Sturgeon’s party. At the time, the five opposition MSPs – including Wightman himself – were accused of being responsible for leaking the information, but the former Green member has now taken to Twitter to air his views as to the real culprit.

Wightman claims that the ‘shocking leaks’ were ‘one of the most serious breaches of the MSP Code of Conduct ever to have taken place’ but that ‘having been at the centre of events I am now very confident that I know who was responsible.’ He claims that after Sky News first broke the story, SNP spin doctors ‘mounted an intensive campaign to discredit opposition MSPs on the Committee.’ This included SNP members ‘wilfully’ breaking the Code of Conduct to defame the five non-SNP members and ‘private briefings went out to undermine me in particular.’  He concluded:

So who was responsible for the leak? Well cui bono? The SNP playbook is often to manage the release of information, to discredit unhelpful narratives and to mount personal attacks on those they disagree with. Opposition MSPs had no interest in leaking the committee’s findings in advance. This would merely serve to undermine the impact of the report’s publication. The vicious smears and lies spun by the SNP comms machine plus the timings of documents I circulated leads me to the conclusion that it was an SNP member of the committee who leaked these findings to the SNP media in order to spend the next four days trashing the committee. In the coming months we will learn more I hope about what exactly went on.

For their part, the SNP have pushed back firmly, with a spokesperson saying that: ‘No SNP member on the committee leaked anything from the inquiry – to suggest this to be the case is ludicrous and without a shred of foundation.’ Will the truth eventually out? In Nicola Sturgeon’s Scotland, don’t be so sure.

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