In any functional nation, Friday’s revelations in Parliament by Sir David Davis would have been headline news. An extremely powerful figure, the then-First Minister’s chief of staff, was named and accused of conspiring with the Scottish Government, civil service and media to imprison an innocent man – the former leader of the country – on very serious charges of sexual assault, and of seeking to destroy his reputation by illegally leaking the false allegations to the press.
Liz Lloyd had never been publicly named as the suspect before that moment, so it was almost immeasurably bizarre that only two of Scotland’s newspapers (and two of its lowest-selling), namely The Times and – belatedly – The National, bothered to even report the accusation, far less spend any time seriously delving into it.
But it still wasn’t as odd as THIS response from a former Green MSP.
What on Earth is being suggested here? Let’s try to find out.
The first point to note is that Wightman’s tweet is, as a basic matter of fact, a lie in at least two ways. We’ll deal with the second one first. By “the investigation” he can only reasonably mean the Scottish Government’s inquiry into the first tranche of allegations against Salmond, made by two women known as Ms A and Ms B.
But that investigation definitely WAS concluded. Wightman is simply, plainly and inexplicably lying about that. (Obviously, as otherwise how could there have BEEN any “findings” to be “struck down by the court”?)
Its report was completed in August 2018, and subsequently leaked to Davie Clegg of the Daily Record and Kieran Andrews of The Times, who published part of it in a book three years later.
A highly improper process from start to finish, it had concluded that Salmond was guilty of wrongdoing, but was then thrown out (to use the legal term, “reduced”) in the Court Of Session by Lord Pentland on the grounds of being “unlawful”, “unfair” and “tainted with apparent bias”, to the extent that Salmond was awarded his costs on the almost unprecedented “agent and client” basis.
However, while Wightman’s statement about it is a demonstrable lie, one might argue that it was a slightly arcane technical point – it’s a reference (albeit an untruthful one) to a procedural matter rather than the allegations themselves.
Which brings us back to his other statement, repeated in the above tweet: namely that “there is no evidence that the allegations are false”. And that is a jaw-dropping falsehood, because the most serious accusations from Ms A and Ms B went on to form part of the charge sheet in Salmond’s criminal trial.
(Not all of them did – some were so ludicrously trivial that they didn’t even make the list of absurdly minor supposed infractions that the Crown scrabbled together in a vain attempt to firm up their case via the dodgy “Moorov doctrine”, given the total absence of evidence for the main charges. In other words, these were claims of misconduct even LESS serious than the catalogue of “hair-pinging” and shoulder-patting incidents that Salmond was accused of in the witness box.)
And of course, there’s an abundance of evidence that those allegations were false, because they were tried to the fullest possible extent in Scotland’s highest court and Salmond was found innocent on every charge – something which remarkably seems to have escaped Andy Wightman’s attention, because yesterday he declared that he himself had interviewed both Ms A and Ms B (long AFTER the trial at which their accusations were rejected by the jury, remember) and decided that in fact their complaints were “credible”.
That is an extraordinary statement. Wightman is announcing that despite a 14-day trial in which a mostly-female jury led by a female judge heard all the evidence, watched every second of every cross-examination of witnesses and the accused and concluded that the complaints were NOT credible, Andy Wightman (who did not do those things) knows better, and flat-out rejects the findings of the jury.
On the face of it that claim is utterly preposterous, and a grave insult to the intelligence and the integrity of both the jury and Lady Dorrian, who presided over the trial. So on what grounds does Wightman feel able to make it?
Andy Wightman got to interview Ms A and Ms B because he sat on the Scottish Government inquiry which attempted to discover why the initial investigation had been such a disastrous trainwreck. And everyone agreed that the last straw was Judith Mackinnon claiming on oath at the commission-and-diligence hearing under Lord Pentland not to remember a meeting she had with Ms A on 16 January 2018.
Ms A could have cleared up a question at the heart of the whole shambles which remains unaddressed: namely how on Earth could Mackinnon have completely forgotten by December 2018 this vital prior contact with Ms A just months earlier?
So Wings hereby puts on record the following question to Andy Wightman:
During your interviewing of Ms A, did you at any point ask her about her meeting with Judith Mackinnon on 16 January 2018?
It was also revealed that Judith Mackinnon (who as the Investigating Officer was not supposed to have had any prior involvement with complainers) had met with Ms B just a few days later, on 24 January 2018.
The meeting was not disclosed by the Scottish Government even to its own legal counsel at Lord Pentland’s judicial review until December 2018, to their considerable bewilderment and fury, and made their job of defending the government impossible.
Therefore we must also put this question to Andy Wightman:
During your interviewing of Ms B, did you at any point ask her about her meeting with Judith Mackinnon on 24 January 2018?
Because if he didn’t, that would appear to be a quite extraordinary dereliction of duty on his part, and render his assertion that these witnesses were “credible” to be farcical.
It was the collapse of the crooked, incompetent Scottish Government inquiry that led to Salmond facing a criminal trial, at huge cost to both him and the Scottish taxpayer. Ms A and Ms B, and their improper contacts with Judith Mackinnon, were ultimately the core reason for that collapse.
Andy Wightman appears to have signally failed in his duty as a member of the Scottish Parliament inquiry to properly investigate these facts, and has then compounded that failure by casting doubt on the verdict of the jury at the criminal trial, as well as on the competency and integrity of Police Scotland and the Crown Office And Procurator Fiscal Service, which declined to bring the more trivial of Ms A and Ms B’s accusations to court despite having set an incredibly low bar for criminality.
(So low, in fact, that Salmond WAS initially charged – though the charge was later dropped – for… recklessly opening a bottle of fizzy water.)
Wightman’s protestations that he’s referring only to the inquiry rather than the trial do not hold up, since he makes a blanket statement that “there is NO evidence that the allegations are false” (our capitals), but “the allegations” in the context of the Scottish Government investigation includes some which WERE tried in court and rejected. And the others were not considered even worthy of attempted prosecution, which at a minimum is circumstantial evidence that they were not credible.
(Wightman suggested that they “were found not to meet the criminal threshold” – by who? – and left them hanging as cheap vague innuendo like a coward, despite having admonished people to “stop minimising sexual harassment”. But the evidence above inescapably points to the conclusion that the supposed “sexual harassment” being alleged was of a level LESS serious than accidentally spilling water on someone.)
And last but not least, of course, Andy Wightman is unmistakeably implying that Alex Salmond is in fact guilty, or at least under suspicion of, criminal sexual harassment which has never been brought to trial and is not under any police investigation.
Our final and most pressing question to Mr Wightman, then, is this:
Which questions relating to the allegations of sexual misconduct against Alex Salmond do you consider to be “still unanswered”?
Specifically which criminal offences do you believe Alex Salmond to be still under suspicion of having committed, and does that include any of those of which he was charged and acquitted in the High Court?
Does your tweet at 7.46pm on 20 July 2024 imply, as it clearly appears to, that Alex Salmond was/is guilty of the civil offence of “sexual harassment”?
We look forward to his response.
