Nicola Sturgeon is a little sorry for the Alex Salmond debacle

“THERE’S something going on. I can’t prove it, but I can smell it,” said Gordon Jackson QC, as he concluded the defence of Alex Salmond last March. Mr Salmond, the former first minister of Scotland, was on trial for 13 charges of sexual assault, including an attempted rape, against nine women. Mr Salmond, his lawyer conceded, could be a “bad boy”, but the allegations of criminality were the product of a “murky, murky world” of Holyrood intrigue. Mr Salmond was cleared by the jury. The previous year, he had overturned an internal Scottish government probe into claims by two women, after a judge found procedural errors left the process “tainted by apparent bias”.

The smell lingers, and the proof remains elusive. On March 3rd Nicola Sturgeon, Mr Salmond’s successor, gave evidence for eight hours to a committee of the Scottish government investigating her role in the affair. She faces three broad charges. The most serious, and least credible, is Mr Salmond’s claim that he is a victim of a “malicious and concerted” plot by Ms Sturgeon’s inner circle to send him to jail. The others are more damaging: that she misled the Scottish Parliament about her knowledge of the allegations against Mr Salmond, and that her government wasted public money by pushing on with contesting the judicial review when her lawyers regarded the case as unwinnable....