Alex Salmond accuses Nicola Sturgeon of presiding over ‘failures of leadership’

Former Scottish first minister Alex Salmond on Friday accused his former protégé and successor Nicola Sturgeon of presiding over a failure of national leadership.

Salmond’s comments, made in a long-awaited appearance before a committee of the parliament in Edinburgh, will fuel bitter divisions within the governing Scottish National party and risk undermining its push for Scotland’s independence from the UK.

“The failures of leadership are many and obvious and yet . . . not a single person has taken responsibility,” he said. “Scotland hasn’t failed, its leadership has failed.”

The escalating dispute between Salmond and Sturgeon, two of modern Scotland’s most influential politicians, centres on a botched government investigation in 2018 into harassment complaints against the former first minster.

In 2019, the Scottish government accepted that the investigation had been “tainted by apparent bias”. At a separate criminal trial last year, Salmond was acquitted of all of the 13 sexual offences charges against him.

Salmond told the committee, which is investigating the handling of harassment complaints made against him by two civil servants in 2018, that its work had been undermined by the government and public prosecutors.

“This committee has been blocked and tackled at every turn with calculated and deliberate suppression of key evidence,” in a “blurring of boundaries between government, party and prosecution service”, he said.

“These events shine a light on a government whose actions are no longer true to the principles of openness, accountability and transparency,” he said.

In a submission to the committee published on Monday, Salmond accused close associates of Sturgeon — who succeeded him as first minister in 2014 — of involvement in a “deliberate, prolonged, malicious and concerted effort . . . to damage my reputation, even to the extent of having me imprisoned”.

Salmond, who stepped down as SNP leader after voters in Scotland rejected independence in a 2014 referendum by a 55-45 per cent margin, told the committee that the two-and-a-half years since the allegations were made had been a “nightmare”.

Sturgeon, who is scheduled to appear before the committee on Wednesday, has dismissed suggestions that there was a conspiracy against her former mentor as an “alternative reality”. She has also denied claims by Salmond that she misled parliament about meetings in 2018 between the two at which they discussed the civil service-led investigation into his conduct.

Misleading parliament is a breach of the ministerial code and would normally result in the resignation of anyone found to have done so.

Salmond, who has accused the Crown Office public prosecution service of improperly seeking to prevent the committee from considering parts of his evidence, told the hearing the service’s leaders seemed to have “no understanding of the separation of powers” or “the rule of law itself”.

James Wolffe, who as Scotland’s Lord Advocate is chief legal adviser to the SNP government and head of the Crown Office, told parliament this week that prosecutors had acted “objectively, professionally and in the public interest”.

Their only purpose in raising concerns about Salmond’s submissions had been to secure respect for a court order preserving the anonymity of the women whose allegations were the basis of his criminal trial, Wolffe said.

The dispute between the former and current leaders of the SNP, which has governed Scotland since 2007, threatens to undermine its chances of a sweeping victory in May’s Scottish parliamentary elections. The party hopes a landslide will provide a platform to push for a swift second independence referendum.