David Davis may be the last of his kind – a libertarian Tory from a council-scheme and grammar-school background, and also one of the few remaining big beasts occupying the political jungle of the back benches.
(He could in fact have been Tory leader, and would have been if David Cameron and George Osborne hadn’t teamed up to defeat him in 2005 after he won the first ballot.)
He resigned from Cameron’s shadow cabinet in 2008 on a principled issue of civil liberties (winning the subsequent by-election with a massive 72% of the vote) and from Theresa May’s Cabinet over Brexit, and he was one of a tiny handful of MPs prepared to defend Julian Assange from extradition.
And in 2022 it was Davis who rose from the back benches to tell Boris Johnson to “in the name of God, go”.
So on the rare occasions when he leads a Commons adjournment debate, as he did last Thursday evening, those with an educated eye for politics sit up and take notice.
Instead of playing to the normally empty House that witnesses an adjournment debate, a good part of the Parliamentary Labour Party turned up to listen, although none of the SNP’s dramatically-reduced cohort bothered. Which is a shame, as it was, in some senses, about them.
Davis’s latest evisceration of the Scottish Government’s unlawful pursuit of Alex Salmond resulted in both Sturgeon and Salmond trending on social media. (The mainstream media, as we’ve noted, mostly cowered in silence.)
Three years ago, when Davis first raised the Scottish Government’s hounding of Salmond, the political temperature was entirely different. To most independence supporters Nicola Sturgeon could do no wrong, even after it became painfully apparent that her government couldn’t run a tap without flooding an orphanage, and that their commitment to the SNP’s historic goal of independence was purely ceremonial.
Now things are different. Most sane nationalists and even many of her formerly-loyal former MPs now think Sturgeon’s feet of clay extend right up to her neck, but Davis’s approach didn’t change.
The headline reports from Thursday centred on his revelation that he had spoken to a witness with evidence that Sturgeon’s right-hand woman Liz Lloyd was the source of the damaging criminal leak to the Daily Record.
Davis is well-versed in the arcane rules around parliamentary privilege and does his research. When he cites a witness or a source he’s met them in person, when he quotes a document he’s seen it with his own eyes.
(He notes with justified pride that no whistleblower has ever been outed in any of his many campaigns defending civil liberties.)
But a detailed assessment of the Davis speech shows his targets go wider and deeper. He believes that the Scottish Government colluded with the civil service to fit up their ex-leader and drive him from public life.
It’s an established fact that they made a mockery of their duty of candour to the Court of Session, hence the award of exemplary costs to Salmond over his judicial review, but Davis also has the evidence to show that they’ve continued their campaign of redaction and cover-up on the same industrial scale of their WhatsApp deletions.
When the plot failed in the Court Of Session they enrolled the Crown Office to make matters criminal, and when that crashed on the rock of a Scottish jury, all three actors – the Scottish Government, civil service and criminal authorities – combined to prevent the truth emerging.
To this end they have stopped at nothing as Davis – alongside Wings and pretty much nobody else – has continued to painstakingly detail the commission, and the increasingly desperate concealment, of perjury.
One journalist has been jailed, another hauled into the Sheriff Court on trumped-up charges, a Parliamentary inquiry committee has been undermined, threatened and compromised, and court battles have been fought to prevent disclosure of compromising information – all for the sake of protecting a queen bee who’s already (at least officially) left the hive.
In a devastating and detailed aside during the debate, Davis turned on former Crown Agent, David Harvie, for his boasts under oath to the Parliamentary committee that he had never discussed the Salmond issue with his then line manger Leslie Evans, Permanent Secretary to the Scottish Government. Presumably Harvie’s intent was to emphasise the “independence” of the prosecution service.
However, Davis has now revealed that documents prove beyond any dispute that Harvie HAD indeed discussed the case with Leslie Evan’s private secretary, her “representative on Earth”, in the days before his own involvement, and the notion that the PS would not have immediately communicated that to Evans is farcical. It is, at the very best, a deeply cynical piece of misdirection.
Readers may feel that’s a poor example to set, under oath, from the man then in charge of criminal justice in Scotland. (Harvie was, of course, the man who authorised the proceedings against journalists attempting to lift the lid on the whole rancid affair.)
Davis now has a number of such people in his crosshairs, and as their activities are increasingly exposed to the light of day the pressure on them to crack will be considerable. A civil servant or Crown Office official suppressing evidence of perjury is a very grave matter indeed, and the first to assist the police with their enquiries will be the likeliest to avoid taking an extended holiday in a room with barred windows.
At the end of his first debate on the issue three years ago the Tory government minister replying accepted Davis’s case for the constitutional separation of the prosecution service from government legal advice from its law officers.
At the end of last Thursday’s debate, the new Labour minister replying accepted the case for Scottish Parliamentarians having rights of privilege to enable them to stand up to Government injustice and overreach. With the SNP facing the likelihood of losing office, and with it the ability to conceal evidence and obstruct investigations, that too will be generating sweat on a number of brows.
These, and the also-promised imposition of the duty of candour, would be highly significant profound constitutional gains for the Scottish Parliament arising from this sorry affair. But alert readers may be wondering why Davis, a Tory, would seek to make the Scottish Parliament stronger and more fit for purpose. Might that not make independence more attractive?
It’s doubtful that Davis cares that much. His deep involvement with the Leave campaign, while it won’t win him many fans among Wings readers, reveals him as someone who’s in fact more of an English nationalist that a die-in-a-ditch unionist.
But more to the point, one can disagree with someone’s principles while still admiring their adherence to them, and Davis’s track record shows that whatever else he may be, he IS a politician of genuine principle, a rare and dying breed.
And for as long as the Scottish Parliament remains an entity of the UK he appears to be more concerned with it being a good Parliament than whether it’s independent or devolved. Indeed, it could be convincingly argued that he’s done more to genuinely enhance its powers all by himself than the entire combined might of the SNP has managed in the last decade.
Davis is playing a serious game, and to paraphrase Leslie Evans, clearly intends to win both the battle AND the war for justice. For that, at least, all Yes supporters should thank him. But in the view of this site he is an honourable ally in the eternal fight for truth, as well as – although he may not intend such a thing – the fight for a Scotland worthy and capable of independence too.
