Update 16:00, 04/04/15: It’s been suggested to me from several quarters that the leaker may be Alistair Carmichael or someone in his office. As Secretary of State for Scotland the memorandum would definitely have crossed his desk, and it might help the 10 other Liberal Democrats trying to retain their seats in mainland Scotland.
Update, 15:24, 22/05/2015: It was Alistair Carmichael. He authorised his special advisor to leak the memo. Crucially, the Cabinet Secretary’s investigation suggests that there is no evidence that the memo’s contents were incorrect. However, in a letter from Carmichael apologising to Sturgeon, he writes that “the details of that account are not correct”.
I have received letter from @acarmichaelmp apologising for leak and accepting that contents of memo not correct pic.twitter.com/k6Kkt8dkwC
— Nicola Sturgeon (@NicolaSturgeon) May 22, 2015
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Vote SNP, get Tory. It’s not the campaign that Jim Murphy wanted to run when he became leader of Scottish Labour, but it’s what the party now thinks is its last, best hope of blunting the SNP surge.
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So the Telegraph’s frontpage this morning will be a shot in the arm for both Murphy and Ed Miliband – “Sturgeon’s secret backing for Cameron” is their splash. They’ve got hold of a memorandum written by a senior British civil servant in which Nicola Sturgeon appears to tell the French Ambassador she’d prefer that David Cameron remain as Prime Minister and that she doesn’t see Ed Miliband as a potential Prime Minister.
It’s all been hotly denied by both the SNP and the French Embassy. The Telegraph has published the memorandum in full, but the key section is below:
The Ambassador also had a truncated meeting with the FM (FM running late after a busy Thursday…). Discussion appears to have focused mainly on the political situation, with the FM stating that she wouldn’t want a formal coalition with Labour; that the SNP would almost certainly have a large number of seats; that she had no idea ‘what kind of mischief’ Alex Salmond would get up to; and confessed that she’d rather see David Cameron remain as PM (and didn’t see Ed Miliband as PM material). I have to admit that I’m not sure that the FM’s tongue would be quite so loose on that kind of thing in a meeting like that, so it might well be a case of something being lost in translation.”
The civil servant’s scepticism isn’t quite justified – as the French officials in question were all fluent English speakers the conversation took place without translators. So what’s going on? Yes, the story’s been furiously denied by Sturgeon and the French Ambassador in the strongest terms. Readers with long memories will remember Tony Blair denying he wanted rid of his Chancellor, Gordon Brown, or Gordon Brown denying he wanted rid of his Chancellor, Alistair Darling. We now know that these denials were false.
In this instance, almost every think-tanker, lobbyist, member of parliament or party staffer I’ve spoken to has, at some point over the last five years said they can’t see Ed Miliband as Prime Minister. (“I look at the numbers and think we’re fine. I look at him and think we’re fucked,” was the colourful reaction of one Labour staffer. A Conservative MP told me recently that “At the crunch, this country will never make Miliband Prime Minister.”) During the referendum, one of the repeated refrains from activists within the Yes movement was that Miliband was heading to defeat. The mood music of the independence campaign was that the social democratic government promised by Miliband cannot be delivered within the United Kingdom. So all that Sturgeon needs to have said is: ‘I can’t see Miliband as Prime Minister – but at least it’s easier to argue for independence with a Tory government” which is neither implausible or revelatory.
But what those in Labour who are hoping to gain any traction on this seem to have forgotten, is that for all the repeated Blair-Brown eruptions were seized on by the Tories, they were mostly disbelieved by the party faithful and didn’t stop New Labour winning three elections in a row, two in landslides. It seems likely that this leak will have just as small an effect on the SNP.