Salmond's astonishing naïveté...

Imagine, if you will, that you are a hoary old political warrior. Your cynicism well honed and hide scarred by innumerable past battles, you have a consuming addiction to the strategy of politics, and enjoy a reputation as an uncommonly accomplished calculator in that game. Sitting enthroned in your bastion, triumphant after having handily routed all politics foes, a queer old fellow comes knocking, professing friendship and saying he only wants a chinwag and a caramel wafer for his trouble. On closer inspection, you realise this elderly fellow is known to you. And what luck! To the rest of Britain too. 

Known, most recently, as a rapacious and reactionary corporate thuggee whose enterprises have become implicated in all manner of nefarious deeds. Perhaps not as their originator or even their accessory, but this man is certainly paymaster in all, and promoter of many of those suspected. To the rest of politics, so besmirching and risky has proximity to this character become, that all past encounters and past efforts to court him are hastily – if not entirely convincingly – jettisoned. Behind the wheezing steamship Rupe bob the flotsam of many political past friendships and courtships, hastily discarded. Sodden Labour and Tory rosettes float in his wake. 

Naturally, here’s the sort of fellow it would clearly prove politically advantageous to admit into one’s official residence for a chin-wag in February 2012. Embracing the leper may be a Christian duty, but to a politician with a speck of nous – never mind a track record of cunning application – it ought to be anathema. In that context, reconsider Johann Lamont’s remarks at FMQs yesterday, not as a partisan attempt to nail Alex to the cross – but as a matter of practical political calculation: 

“Rupert’s newspapers might be being investigated for bribery, perverting the course of justice, destroying evidence and perjury, but he is still welcome in wee Eck’s house… There are three police investigations, a judicial inquiry, and nearly 50 arrests, but Eck still puts the kettle on for Rubert.” 

On the News International side, this seems to me to be a pretty fair summary of the context, after all. It is an engulfing scandal, which may yet see a number of people adjudged guilty and clapped in irons. Above all, how it will unfold remains uncertain, so cultivating – intentionally or unintentionally – any perceptions of closeness to very visible figures entangled in it is profoundly risky. Which makes you wonder, at what point did Alex’s political acumen – or caution – desert him, and why? What the devil was he thinking, in admitting this man to Bute House last February, recognising as he did the political impact of “the revelations about phone hacking and Milly Dowler”? 

Alex’s defence is that it was all about jobs. And indeed, this account certainly finds some support in the evidence submitted to Leveson (Exhibit KRM 28), where Salmond's 12th of February lunch meeting with Murdoch is described as concerning “News Corporation’s investments in Scotland”. This is corroborated by a remark made by Salmond at First Minister’s Questions on the 1st of March 2012. Pressed by Lamont, Alex Salmond described the 12th of February meeting as:

“… a meeting to determine jobs and the economic footprint of Scotland”.

That well before the stated rationale of the encounter became a matter of generalised political controversy.  Seen as a matter of bare calculation, meeting Rupert in February was colossally risky – and indeed, is so obviously colossally risky , that one really has to wonder what possessed Salmond or his advisers to permit it to proceed. Here was a man recently pulled before parliament, whose organisation was already implicated in extensive and organised phone-hacking, including of the phone of a prominent victim of murder, the corruption of police officers, and several high profile former employees had been arrested and may yet be charged.  While the Motorman report seems strongly to support the thesis that this wasn't a Murdoch-paper problem, but an industry problem, nevertheless, with the closure of the News of the World, Murdoch has been the emblematic figure.  

Ah, but those jobs. Remember those jobs. A First Minister is under an obligation to strain every sinew to secure investment in Scotland. It would be remiss, negligent even, to do otherwise. 

Up to a point, Lord Copper. But what this argument implies – and implies none-too-convincingly – is that the only way Salmond could hope to emphasise the importance of BSkyB’s employment operations in Scotland was personally to invite the indicted figure of Murdoch over to his public residence. All of which smacks of, I’m afraid, a familiar piece of politician’s whimsy. That sense of your indispensability, fondly fancying yourself a grand man of action at the centre of it all, making all the vital directions and interventions. This is politics in the West Wing line, where the majestic charisma of the central character of the drama and their personal relations are pompously fetishised. Let us sit down, and talk, as men. 

In the past, I’ve railed against the complacency implicit the First Minister’s answers on phone-hacking, which have implied – against the grain of the available evidence – that the whole imbroglio could safely be confined to Fleet Street, and that Scottish politicians needn’t trouble themselves too much about it. I wonder now if that sense of complacency about the Scottish dimensions – and a sense of London as a different political world, and its controversies as inapplicable north of the Tweed – contributed to the insensitivity which saw Salmond serve up shimmering bar of Tunnock’s finest to one of the most embattled and maligned figures in British public life, apparently without a twinge of apprehension about how this would be perceived, or the narratives and potentially discrediting accounts of himself which it may - and now has - contributed to. 

This Salmond’s tu quoque defence, and reasonable invocation of Labour hypocrisy and mutual incrimination simply won’t – can’t – answer. While it is certainly true that Labour leaders and Prime Ministers and their Tory successors were slithering supplicants, worldly men engaged in worldly business in Rupert's court, that cannot account for Salmond's strange unwillingness to make the obvious political calculation, and like the rest, contrive to put some political distance between himself and this lighting rod of hostile commentary.  Not to have done so has demonstrated either astonishing naïveté or foolish complacency. Even accepting the First Minister’s account of his motivations in meeting Murdoch, and the economic interest at stake, keeping in so visibly with Rupe after this scandal broke was, in that cunning old dog Fouché’s phrase, “worse than a crime, it was a blunder”. 

If this is “canny” political operating, then I’m a turnip.