Sturgeon is in danger, but the separatist ideal even more so

It still all looks pretty good. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon continues to dominate Scottish television screens with matriarchal messaging on Covid; the pandemic provides an almost custom-built cover for the massive SNP failures in schooling and healthcare; and the opinion polls consistently register public support for independence as a petulant response to Brexit. Many SNP supporters can hardly be blamed for exuding complacency.

Behind this reassuring facade, however, all is not well with the separatist cause and especially with Nicola Sturgeon. Veteran Sturgeon-watchers note the facial expressions and body language in unguarded moments. The strain is getting to her and it is not principally the stress of handling the pandemic, but rather from the Sword of Damocles hanging over her political career. For Nicola Sturgeon has fallen foul of the Curse of Salmond and the clever money is on it terminating her leadership of the nationalist government and movement.

The Byzantine intrigues and manoeuvres that have led to this situation exceed the Schleswig-Holstein Question in complexity; but, as is so often the case in the endgame of a political crisis, the terminal outcome is extremely simple. A First Minister of Scotland who breaches the ministerial code and misleads parliament is required to resign from office and there is no permutation of the evidence that has emerged from the Holyrood inquiry into l’affaire Salmond that the most gifted Jesuit practitioner of sophistry could plausibly represent as anything other than a flagrant breach of the code by Sturgeon.

The wheels are moving slowly, due to the pandemic, but they are moving effectively and remorselessly towards an unavoidable conclusion: Sturgeon must go. In précis, this long-running political saga relates to the charges of sexual offences against former First Minister Alex Salmond, on all of which he was acquitted at the High Court in Edinburgh last year.

Nicola Sturgeon is now under investigation on two separate matters: an inquiry headed by James Hamilton, Ireland’s former director of public prosecutions, is examining whether she interfered with the government inquiry into Alex Salmond and a Holyrood parliamentary committee also investigating Sturgeon’s conduct has responded to Salmond’s recent denunciation of her account of her actions to parliament as “simply untrue” by demanding Hamilton expand his inquiry to include Salmond’s evidence.

The First Minister has been all over the place in her inconsistent claims. She has admitted to having three meetings and two telephone conversations with Alex Salmond, though she did not inform the head of the Scottish civil service about those contacts until the eve of the second meeting. She also “forgot” she had had a meeting with Salmond’s former chief of staff at Holyrood on 29 March 2018. She met Salmond at her home in Glasgow on 2 April 2018, in Aberdeen on 7 June and again at her Glasgow home on 24 July, as well as having telephone conversations with him on 23 April and 18 July.

But there was no impropriety about those contacts, according to Sturgeon, because they related to SNP party business, not government. As she told the Scottish parliament: “Like other party leaders here, I have responsibilities as leader of my party and I took part in meetings in that capacity.”

This was contradicted, however, by her husband Peter Murrell, chief executive of the SNP, who stated that he knew Salmond was visiting his wife at their Glasgow home, but she “told me she couldn’t discuss the details”. As Murrell expressed it: “When she says she can’t talk about something, that’s the end of it.” So, when he came home and found Sturgeon’s and Salmond’s chiefs of staff, along with Salmond’s legal adviser, in his living room, and his wife and Salmond closeted together in another room, he went upstairs for a shower.

In other words, it was clearly government business. Had it been party business, Murrell, as SNP chief executive, would have been an essential participant. Similarly, the SNP government has withheld material the inquiry requested, on grounds of “legal privilege”, which could only apply to government material. So, one minute the Sturgeon-Salmond dialogue is party business, the next it is government, as suits Sturgeon’s interests. It is that see-sawing between two conflicting narratives that  threatens to destroy her. Salmond’s recent evidence to Hamilton is potentially lethal for Sturgeon.

If it is established beyond doubt that she has breached the ministerial code and misled parliament, where will that end? Will she try to tough it out and refuse to resign, relying on a parliamentary majority to keep her in post? Possibly, but last year MSPs voted 63-55 to have the government disclose the legal advice on the Salmond affair. On the other hand, the threat of losing the First Minister would probably close SNP ranks.

Yet this situation is abnormal. If Sturgeon were threatened by any Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat attack, she could rely on wholehearted nationalist support. But her accuser and alleged victim this time is Alex Salmond, an even bigger separatist icon than Sturgeon, the man who took the SNP from a handful of MPs arriving by taxi at Westminster to 14 years of consecutive governance of a devolved Scotland and delivered an independence referendum. The schism between Salmondistas and Sturgeonites lies deep and cruel.

This will be seriously debilitating for the separatist movement for years to come. When Kenny MacAskill, former justice secretary, of Lockerbie bomber fame, and Salmond’s vicar on earth, and other intransigent loyalists give the former leader the “Parnell – my dead king!” treatment, it strikes a resonance in too many places for the Sturgeon establishment to feel secure. And it comes at a bad time.

The SNP is facing a much less certain future than superficial appearances suggest. It may be able to kick the can of failed policies further down the road by using the pandemic as a catch-all alibi for failing schools, hospital waiting lists and other embarrassments, but there is an elephant in the room that can only grow larger: Brexit.

It has been received opinion among political commentators since 2015 that Brexit is a gift to the SNP and a grave threat to the Union. That misdiagnosis appears to be borne out by repeated pro-independence opinion polls and embittered Remainer vox pops north of the Border. However, as some of us have been pointing out for six years, the long-term threat from Brexit is to separatism. True, the early post-Brexit years, aggravated by the economic consequences of the pandemic, are likely to be tough. But Scottish voters know there is no conceivable scenario whereby Scotland could vote for independence and step lightly into the lifeboat of the EU.

There would be years of transition and Scots know, after witnessing the aggressive treatment of the United Kingdom – the world’s fifth largest economy and a nuclear power with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council – by the European Union, how little consideration they could expect from Brussels and how non-existent their bargaining chips would be in applying for membership.

Even in debating such an hypothesis, a new issue is bound to dominate the independence debate – and not before time. The biggest failure of the unionist camp, despite winning the 2014 referendum, has been its inability to demolish the nonsensical proposition expressed by the term “independence in Europe”. The notion that 5.5 million Scots, supposedly stifled in a loose-knit devolved Union of 67 million people, would find “independence” in an ever-integrating, ever more regulated Union of 448 million people, with negligible influence on its policies, is opposed to all reason.

But that was not previously obvious, simply because EU membership was the status quo: generations had grown up knowing no other settlement. Now, however, the lunatic mantra “independence in Europe” would compel separatists to explain how “independence” could be attained by leaving a small and loose-knit Union to join a massive leviathan driving constantly diminishing autonomy for member states. It is a palpable nonsense.

There is, as Boris Johnson rightly affirms, no possible justification for having an independence referendum any time soon. If, in the meantime, the United Kingdom prospers under Brexit and the wounds of the EU referendum war heal, eventually the notion of Scots exchanging devolved autonomy within a familiar and successful Union for the oppressive uniformity of a bureaucratic empire straitjacketed by a synthetic currency will seem not so much uncongenial as downright bizarre. And that will apply regardless of the political fortunes of Nicola Sturgeon.