In August 2018, David Clegg, the political editor of Scotland’s Daily Record, received what he calls “the most memorable email of my life”. It came from the paper’s head of news and carried a note from an anonymous whistleblower detailing how two women had made sexual misconduct complaints about Scotland’s former first minister, Alex Salmond. All through that summer the papers had been full of the #MeToo allegations against Harvey Weinstein and others. The complaints against Salmond appeared to bring that movement sensationally closer to home. The following morning, after the accusations had been made, the Record ran with a headline reading “SALMOND REPORTED TO COPS OVER SEX ATTACKS CLAIM” and that afternoon the politician was facing a press conference in which one reporter posed the question: “If someone asked me if I was a groper, I’d say ‘no’. Why can’t you say ‘no’, Alex?”
The fallout from such questions has dominated Scottish politics for the past three years, all but destroying Salmond’s career, and for a while threatening that of his protegee and successor in the nationalist party, Nicola Sturgeon. Clegg’s inside story of that destructive drama, written with Kieran Andrews, his counterpart at the Times, is a definitive account not only of the March 2020 court case in which Salmond was acquitted of 14 sexual assault charges after a two-week trial in Edinburgh, but also of the judicial review, which found Sturgeon’s government’s investigations into the allegations to have been unlawful, unfair and “tainted by apparent bias”. In their effort to convey the explosiveness of these events to readers outside Scotland, the authors suggest that the equivalent in Westminster might have involved learning that “David Cameron had been accused of committing a sex attack in Downing Street and had responded by launching legal action against Theresa May”.
If this is primarily conceived as Salmond’s and Sturgeon’s drama, there are plenty of contingent actors in a dispiriting tale of power games and hubris, not least of course the 10 women – alphabetised for the purposes of the court, from A to K – who came forward to detail a catalogue of ultimately unsubstantiated offences against Salmond, which ranged from unwanted touching to attempted rape. Clegg and Andrews claim not to want to retry those cases; having read their exhaustive account of the evidence over two decades it is, however, hard to disagree either with their conclusion that “the women who dared to speak up have been ignored, vilified and abandoned” or that “the behaviour admitted to by Salmond should not be excused just because he was acquitted”.
It is clear from their account that Sturgeon had long known about Salmond’s volatility, though she was, according to the authors, “knocked sideways” by the “realisation that his conduct toward women had also fallen short”. In the critical private meeting in which Salmond admitted to her that he had previously had to apologise for inappropriate behaviour towards a female civil servant during his time as first minister, she recalled having to excuse herself from the room in the pretence that she was going to make a cup of tea, while really she was heading to the bathroom “and feeling physically sick”. The “betrayal” was so keenly felt, she recalled, because this was “the most influential and important person in my adult life” beyond her parents and husband. “Somebody that I loved, on a level.”
The last general election seemed to confirm Sturgeon as a great political survivor, shrugging off both Salmond’s upheld allegations of procedural irregularity and his new party, Alba. If nothing else, however, that admission of long-term devotion should call into account the first minister’s judgment. Salmond does not emerge from this story as an obvious candidate for unwavering faith.
Inappropriate behaviour is not always criminal, as Salmond’s story shows, but it does require a leadership culture in which blind eyes are routinely turned and excuses made. The examination of failed procedure here provides a perfect case study in how compromises come to be made, even in organisations more comprehensively transparent than the SNP. Salmond had energised a moribund political movement and placed it in touching distance of a once unlikely goal. As one senior official confided to Clegg and Andrews, he could, for a long time, quite literally, do no wrong: “Do I have questions that I ask myself over whether I’m blameless or not?” the official wondered. “Of course I do. These are my friends. But set that aside – why did we tolerate it? Because of the prize.”
Break-Up: How Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon Went to War by David Clegg and Kieran Andrews is published by Biteback (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
