The real charge sheet is that the SNP Government has perpetrated serial deception and contempt for safeguards which are supposed to limit the power of the executive – including, but by no means limited to, misleading Parliament, the abuse of court procedures, contempt for Freedom of Information and use of public money as if it is their own private piggy-bank.
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All of that is borne out by the extraordinary letter sent from the Freedom of Information Commissioner, David Hamilton, to the Permanent Secretary to the Scottish Government, John-Paul Marks. Rarely can such an excoriating indictment have been communicated from one senior Scottish civil servant to another.
My interpretation of Mr Hamilton’s charge sheet is that, in pursuit of Alex Salmond’s downfall, ministers and civil servants have been involved over a period of years in a campaign of deception, delay and cover-up to frustrate the ends of justice and the public’s right to know.
Some of the central characters have gone. Mr Salmond is, sadly, deceased. Nicola Sturgeon has retreated to the library. But one constant figure throughout the entire affair, John Swinney, remains very much in situ as a beneficiary of all the machinations to which he has been party. As Jackie Baillie said yesterday: “He more than any other minister has created the culture of secret Scotland”.
Let us consider just one charge which Mr Hamilton makes against the current First Minister. It was he who decided to appeal, despite legal advice, at the Court of Session against the Commissioner’s decision that a fuller version of the (James) Hamilton report, along with relevant documents, should be released.
This was on grounds that the Scottish Government did not hold that information and indeed it was part of an information management system only accessible by James Hamilton and his team. This turned out to be untrue on every count. I will leave it to readers to translate into common parlance.
Anyone catching up on this story may need a reminder of how James Hamilton came to be involved. He was a former Director of Public Prosecutions in Ireland who, since 2013, was the independent adviser on the Ministerial Code to both Scottish and Welsh governments – the kind of not-too-onerous retirement roles that retired public servants take on.
However, James Hamilton was pressed into high-profile service in the wake of the failed prosecution of Alex Salmond; to adjudicate on whether Nicola Sturgeon had misled the Holyrood committee during its subsequent inquiry. He found that Ms Sturgeon had not breached the Ministerial Code. She had, however, given “an incomplete narrative of events” due to “a genuine failure of recollection”.
While some of us regarded James Hamilton as a bit of an innocent abroad in this assessment, his findings might have drawn a line under the matter. However, swathes of his report had been redacted by the Scottish Government and the Irishman set the ball rolling again when he expressed himself “deeply frustrated” by this outcome.
The reason given for wholesale redactions was that they protected the identities of those who had made complaints against Mr Salmond. However, James Hamilton wrote: “A redacted report that effectively erases the role of any such individual in the matters investigated in the report cannot be properly understood by those reading it, and presents an incomplete and even at times misleading version of events”.
James Hamilton’s comments gave rise to a flurry of Freedom of Information requests from people who, very sensibly, did not trust the Scottish Government and the cabal round Ms Sturgeon to be final arbiters of what needed to be redacted for legitimate reasons. The Information Commissioner came down on the side of applicants and ordered fuller disclosure.
Again, Mr Swinney was – and continues to be – at the centre of protracted manoeuvres to frustrate this outcome and, more generally, to ensure as little light as possible is shed on machinations at the highest levels of the Scottish Government which surrounded the Salmond prosecution. Inevitably, the question is asked: if they go to such lengths to conceal, what can there be to hide?
Alex Salmond was in the process of suing the Scottish Government and seeking £3 million in damages for “misfeasance” in public office. One suspects, however, that the case was more a device for bringing long-suppressed evidence into open court than the pursuit of money. That would certainly now be the case.
Like many who have taken a continuing interest in this case, I was no political friend of Alex Salmond while knowing and respecting some of his qualities. But the ability to be chilled by a conspiracy to put a man behind bars, and then to obstruct every effort to uncover the intended means of achieving it, transcends politics. It is about human decency and how a society is run.
It will be for Mr Salmond’s family to decide whether or not to continue the case in the Court of Session. But there are other means by which the principles which underpin it can and should be pursued.
The interest of opposition parties in the ethics of government must extend beyond mandatory quotes at the end of every story. Before the 2026 elections, there should be a shared commitment to reveal all relevant evidence requested by the Information Commissioner – and to apply lessons Scotland needs to learn from an episode in which the powers of government have been abused so dangerously.
Brian Wilson is a former Labour Party politician. He was MP for Cunninghame North from 1987 until 2005 and served as a Minister of State from 1997 to 2003
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