If Scotland were a one-party state, as some Nationalists clearly believe it to be, the rubbish being uttered about Alistair Carmichael would go unchallenged.
However, fortunately, half of us at least don’t worship at the SNP altar and can detect the whiff of hypocrisy in the attacks on the Lib Dem MP for Orkney and Shetland.
For those who have not followed this story, the former Scottish secretary has taken responsibility for the leaking, from his department, of a memo during the election campaign.
At the time, this caused considerable embarrassment to SNP leader and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. It emanated from a meeting she had had with the French ambassador, in which she allegedly said she wanted David Cameron to be re-elected as Prime Minister because Ed Miliband was not up to the job.
As she had been campaigning hard on an anti-Tory agenda, this undermined her integrity somewhat.
She quickly denied she had made the remarks and the ambassador and the consul-general, who was also present, denied she had too and the civil servant who penned the memo was lambasted for being politically motivated.
The Nationalists demanded and got a cabinet inquiry into the affair, the results of which were published last Friday. These concluded that something might have been “lost in translation” (although the entire conversation had been conducted in English) but, significantly, exonerated the civil servant who had taken the note of the meeting.
The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Haywood, who conducted the inquiry, said there was no reason to doubt the civil servant “recorded accurately what he thought he had heard”.
The report said: “Senior officials who have worked with him say that he is reliable and has no history of inaccurate reporting, impropriety or security lapses.
“There is no evidence of any political motivation or ‘dirty tricks’.”
Hysterical reaction
This does rather leave the essence of the matter open to conjecture. We will probably never know exactly what Sturgeon said or didn’t say but the ferocity of the subsequent Nat offensive against Carmichael does conveniently divert attention away from the SNP leader’s own role in the incident.
Carmichael has accepted the blame for the member of his staff who decided to share the contents of that memo (distributed to a restricted list of recipients) with the press. This is why he is in trouble and why he has handed back his minister’s severance pay (worth nearly £17,000).
He has said he authorised the leaking of the memo to a journalist and has apologised to Sturgeon for the “breach of protocol”. It sounds like he is, quite properly, taking the rap for the actions of a junior member of his team.
In the pantheon of political scheming, how heinous was this crime? Very, according to the hysterical reaction in Nationalist circles. One SNP-supporting paper referred to Carmichael as the “disgraced” former Scottish secretary and reported that “several members of the public” (possibly not unconnected to the SNP) had asked the Parliamentary Commission for Standards to investigate whether he had broken the MPs’ Code of Conduct.
However, was Carmichael’s sin as bad as, say, the tangled web spun by the then-First Minister Alex Salmond, who said he had legal advice over an independent Scotland’s EU membership when he didn’t?
Or as unethical as one of Salmond’s spin doctors smearing a Better Together volunteer, who was subsequently subjected to cybernat abuse, just because she opposed independence? Although Salmond’s man was in clear breach of the special advisers’ code of conduct, there was no resignation, either from him or his boss.
Endorsing harassment
What is worse during an election, an MP authorising the leaking of a memo or a parliamentary candidate the SNP’s Natalie McGarry endorsing the harassment of her opponent, Labour’s Margaret Curran, on the grounds she was a “fair target”?
Sturgeon has called for Carmichael’s resignation as an MP, accusing him of duping his constituents. However, there is less love for the Nationalists in Orkney and Shetland than in most of Scotland and it’s reasonable to expect the electorate there would sooner trust the man they have backed in four elections than any secessionist alternative.
No moral high ground
This saga, which didn’t make a difference to voters at the time and maybe has gone unnoticed by many of them now, reveals more about the SNP than the put-upon Carmichael.
First, their counter attack is second to none and could teach the other parties a thing or two about tactics.
Second, they seriously think they occupy the moral high ground, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary (see above).
And third and most tellingly, they will not be happy until all Scotland is on board the Nationalist bandwagon. If they could claim a scalp from the staunchly Unionist northern isles, that would be the icing on their May 7 cake.