From here, the top of the barrel is so far away that you can’t see so much as a pinprick of daylight through the most powerful pair of binoculars.
In a moving epitaph a few days ago, the widely-respected Professor James Mitchell of the University Of Glasgow noted of Alex Salmond that:
Mandy Rhodes of Holyrood magazine concurred, saying:
And so, then, to Carlos Alba.
Because remarkably, all three of the stories above, all either leading or tagged on the front pages of three newspapers from different publishers, all have the same byline from the same freelancer. That in itself is so vanishingly uncommon an occurrence as to be worthy of considerable note before any wider context is even considered.
But when the freelancer then turns out to be 20th-rate Z-list nobody hack Carlos Alba, it’s definitely time to raise a quizzical eyebrow and see what’s going on.
Carlos Alba, whose pronouns are “They/them”, describes himself as a “former national newspaper editor”, despite the fact that as far as we can ascertain he’s been staff on precisely one national newspaper in his let’s say “career”, and he wasn’t the editor of it.
He worked on the Scotland section of the Sunday Times – which comprises about a dozen pages a week, published only in the Scottish edition, which sells very slightly more copies than The National – from 2000 to 2010 and has almost no detectable footprint in journalism in the last 14 years, in which he’s been scrabbling a living as a low-grade PR man in a “micro-entity” outfit, where by his own assessment his most notable achievement was failing to persuade Scottish Labour members to choose someone other than the legendarily inept Kezia Dugdale as their leader.
He suddenly returned to the Herald last December, 25 years after a very brief stint as its education correspondent in the late 1990s, and his 17 columns in the subsequent 10 months all went largely unnoticed until a piece Wings readers will recall from last month, in which he bleated piteously about Salmond having once been dismissive towards him 24 years ago.
So why is he suddenly on the front pages of three newspapers in one day? Must be quite the blockbuster scoop, right?
Alex Salmond, readers will remember, was put on trial in the High Court of Scotland on a series of charges which included jokingly pinging someone’s curly hair in a busy lift and supposedly putting his hand on someone’s back as she walked up some stairs one time. So it truly boggles the mind to imagine just how trivial these “new” (in fact 40 years old) accusations must have been to be dismissed as “less serious” than that.
That’s a very interesting usage of the word “despite”. But remarkably, the quality of the story goes downhill from there.
The above is an extraordinary passage in almost uncountable ways. The entire basis of the prosecution of Salmond was the controversial “Moorov Doctrine”, which relies on lots of instances of “similar behaviour” to corroborate each other in the absence of any actual evidence.
So if there was someone else with similar complaints to those rejected by the jury, the prosecution would have been falling over itself to add them to the charge sheet. Police Scotland were trawling literally hundreds of people who had made NO complaints at all against Salmond, fishing frantically for anything to bolster the case, and the SNP – in the forms of Ian McCann and Peter Murrell – was doing everything in its power to provide them with more.
So the idea that complaints were brought to McCann and Murrell shortly before the trial and then not eagerly seized upon and fed to the police and prosecutors is several galaxies beyond absurd.
Almost as absurd, in fact, as the “new” complaints being reported two years ago, not to the police but to the SNP, a party Salmond had left in 2018 and which manifestly had no jurisdiction to take any action against him in 2022.
Or as absurd as the idea that Salmond was too “powerful and litigious” to complain about post-trial, when he’d been left financially ruined by his defence and never, to his death, took any action nor even made a comment against his accusers, only the SNP and Scottish Government.
But that watered-down sub-gruel, readers, is the entire actual news content being splashed across the front page of three Scottish papers today: a couple of gossipy quotes of vague innuendo from a couple of unnamed sources “close to” the SNP.
The headlines, indeed, are simply barefaced lies. There is no “investigation”, a word which actually means something specific in the context of a complaint to the police. Police Scotland stated only that they were “assessing” some “information”, which is exactly what they would (be obliged to) do if you walked into a police station tomorrow morning and reported that King Charles was a shape-shifting alien lizard implicated in the disappearance of Shergar.
There is no story here. There is, and there never will be, no “investigation”, no “probe”. Alex Salmond is in a place beyond police questioning and these phantom decades-old accusations are nothing more than another cheap and cowardly anonymous slur, a Frankenstein’s abortion stitched poorly together by a wretched snivelling failure of a man from some urine-soaked scraps of tramp’s clothing he scavenged out of a bin in a desperate quest for attention and significance, while some bacteria living inside the shit up a nearby dead rat’s arsehole looked down on him in disgust.
But while Carlos Alba’s actions are easy to explain, those of three newspaper editors are much less so. Quite why this obvious idiot-sewage has been given any credence, and even put on front pages, is a question with much more sinister connotations.
And seen in the context of the BBC’s repulsive Salmond documentary on Wednesday, in which ambulance-chasing ghouls like Kenny Farquharson and Libby Brooks were given yet another platform to smear the defenceless corpse of Alex Salmond with spiteful lies already thrown out by a judge and jury despite the best massed efforts of the entire establishment of Scotland, it all starts to look somewhat organised.
All decent people can do at this point is sit back and marvel at just how terrified they were of the man that they can’t even let him lay in the ground in peace, nor give his grieving family one day’s respite from their hate. They are the worst filth of Scotland.
