For as long as it has been rumoured, and even more so since it was confirmed, Nicola Sturgeon’s appearance on Wednesday before the Holyrood committee investigating her government’s unlawful handling of complaints made against Alex Salmond promised to be a challenging, perhaps even chastening, moment for the First Minister.
Twin revelations tonight appear to reinforce that supposition. In spades. If Sturgeon’s administration was not facing crisis before, it undoubtedly is now. At the outset of this process — which followed Salmond’s acquittal on all charges made against him in the criminal trial — Sturgeon promised that she and her government would co-operate fully with the inquiry. Such words are cheap, of course, and require the backing of actions.
Those actions were posted missing. In place of candour, there has been obfuscation. Documents have been withheld and witnesses have demonstrated such inadequate powers of recall it is a wonder any of them rose to hold such senior positions within the civil service and the SNP alike. As the process has drawn on — Salmond and Sturgeon were supposed to have testified last year — the sense has grown that the government has had something, perhaps lots of somethings, to hide. This has always been something more easily smelled than proved but it has been a suspicion given credence by the intuitive thought that a government with nothing to hide would not behave in a manner seemingly designed to give the impression it has.
For months the Scottish government has refused to disclose the legal advice it received from external counsel before the government collapsed its own case, conceding the issue to Salmond, in January 2019. As Lord Pentland, the presiding judge, put it, the government’s investigation of two complaints made against the former First Minister was ‘unlawful’ and ‘tainted by apparent bias’.
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