The telegraph
Calm, controlled and forensic, Alex Salmond sought to end his protégé, but it may well be the voters who do the work.
Anyone who has the slightest doubt that we are witnessing the bloody end of a rather spectacular political phenomenon, that is, the double act of Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon, could not have captured even the briefest of fragments of his frank performance in Holyrood on Friday. It is over and therefore must also be the love affair that much of the Scottish electorate seems to have had with Sturgeon last year. The diehards will stay, but how can she keep voters normally non-nationalists, who defeated her in the 2014 referendum and who were won over by her daily television appearances in the battle against Covid? And polls suggest that they can support her in an election within two months and in any subsequent referendum. But Salmond said on Friday that Sturgeon was not fit to govern an independent country and that he undoubtedly broke the ministerial code on what they knew and when there were charges – which he denied – against him for sexual assault. He believed that it was up to an independent inquiry – not him – to decide whether she should resign, but Salmond was enraged that the Crown Office said the evidence could be published and later said it should be “unpublished” . This was an issue that he believes should prompt Lord Advocate to ‘consider his position’, in other words, submit his resignation. Salmond said he had been the target of a ‘witch hunt’ by people close to the Prime Minister, including Peter Murrell – Sturgeon’s husband – who had contacted people to obtain the charges against him. And after a judicial inquiry into an investigation by the Scottish government concluded in his favor – costing the taxpayer more than £ 500,000 – a special government adviser said to a colleague: ‘We will get you in the criminal case’. Salmond said the Scottish government delayed the resolution of the judicial review, even though he knew they would lose, in the hope, he added, that the criminal case against him “would ride to the rescue like cavalry coming from the hill”. In a demonstration of all the powers of forensic debate that once made him a power not only in Scottish politics, but in the United Kingdom, Salmond sought to end his former protégé as a political leader. He said that despite all the negative publicity that the country has suffered in recent days. “Scotland has not failed, its leadership has failed.” He said he wanted Scotland to be independent, but he also wanted it to be a place with robust safeguards, where citizens were not subject to “arbitrary authority”. Wearing an SNP tie and a distinctive lapel – he is not a member of the party now – he remained calm and collected while carefully examining a catalog of what he said was a campaign against him. No one should forget, as Sturgeon will no doubt make clear when she testifies next week, that the root of this incredible saga was allegations of sexual assault against Salmond – allegations he denied – by two public officials. And when commissioners tried to question him about this episode, he repeated the same mantra twice – namely, two judges and one jury cleared him. He urged the committee to continue to reach an agreement to publish censored evidence, but in relation to its main “target” – his successor as prime minister – Salmond said that although he had not made any allegations against third parties that he could not corroborate , so he had not made any specific allegations against Sturgeon. However, in what sounded like a threat, he insisted that he was being prevented from revealing evidence ‘far beyond’ what he had hitherto allowed to reveal. But one question remains at the end of it all, based on the evidence we heard on Friday. That is, can voters really continue to say that they maintain confidence in the Sturgeon when they understand that what they are supporting is a government that is tarnishing not only the good name of important national institutions, but Scotland itself?