Sturgeon accuses Salmond of ‘wild conspiracy’ over evidence claims

Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, on Wednesday accused predecessor Alex Salmond of creating an “alternative reality” of “wild conspiracy” over claims that prosecutors sought to block the Scottish parliament from publishing evidence about contacts between the two.

Salmond, who is locked in a bitter dispute with his former protégé and successor as leader of the Scottish National party, has accused some of Sturgeon’s closest associates of working with other SNP and government officials to destroy his reputation.

On Wednesday, Salmond’s lawyers accused the Crown Office, Scotland’s state prosecution service, of an “unprecedented and highly irregular” intervention in the publication by the Scottish parliament of a submission he made to a committee investigating the government’s handling of harassment complaints against him.

Hours after publishing the submission on Tuesday, the parliament retracted it and republished it with what Salmond said was evidence of government wrongdoing redacted. The former first minister has claimed that Sturgeon misled parliament about when she heard of the complaints against him and the nature of their meetings on the issue.

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

Sturgeon told a coronavirus briefing on Wednesday that suggestions that Crown Office decisions were politically influenced were “downright wrong”.

The first minister said Salmond was creating an “alternative reality in which the organs of the state — not just me, the SNP, the civil service and the Crown Office and the police and women who came forward — were all part of some wild conspiracy against him”.

“Maybe that’s easier than just accepting that at the root of all this might just have been issues with his behaviour,” Sturgeon said.

Opposition parties demanded that James Wolffe, who as Scotland’s Lord Advocate is chief legal adviser to the SNP government and head of the Crown Office, should explain the intervention over Salmond’s submission.

In the Scottish parliament, Wolffe said the decision was made independently by senior prosecutors acting “objectively, professionally and in the public interest”.

“Fundamentally, what is at issue here is an order by the High Court handed down to protect the anonymity of complainers,” he said. “The Crown’s sole interest in this matter . . . is to secure respect for that court order. It has not sought and will not seek to limit the evidence which the committee may have available to it, nor to interfere with the work of the committee.”

Opposition parties have seized on the claims that prosecutors have been acting in Sturgeon’s interest. Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservative group in the Scottish parliament, approvingly retweeted suggestions by a former law professor that the Crown Office had degenerated into a “lickspittle arm of the current SNP government”.

“Crikey, law professor Alistair Bonnington doesn’t miss and hit the wall,” Davidson wrote.

But Aileen McHarg, professor of public law at Strathclyde university, said there was not a shred of evidence for Bonnington’s claims. “People who should know better are undermining the integrity of the Scottish justice system because they hate the current government. That’s a disgrace,” McHarg tweeted.