THe retrial of Alex Salmond is gathering pace. The Kirsty Wark documentary for BBC was, let’s say opportunistically, tied to the opening of the Holyrood inquiry into the Holyrood inquiry, as was Dani Garavelli’s one, on BBC Radio 4 which looked at the civil war in the SNP over the outcome of the trial. There’s nothing wrong with tagging a piece to an upcoming news event – I know both of the women involved and respect them and this isn’t a judgment on the respective programmes, but it is on the way the Scottish Government, and Nicola Sturgeon, have handled this avoidable imbroglio. All it is doing is to confirm for the conspiracy theorists is that there was a conspiracy.

We already know from the court judgment that the first civil service inquiry was fatally flawed, potentially tainted by bias. That alone should have led to the resignation of Leslie Evans, head of the service, but we know that no-one resigns any more.

It came about in the early days of the #MeToo movement, triggered by the Harvey Weinstein affair, when every organisation was desperate to put in place codes of conduct which would shield them from claims over sexual offences. Well and good. But then, unaccountably, and it’s alleged with the cognisance of Sturgeon, she set up the backdated inquiry into Salmond’s behaviour after women had come forward making the claims.

Let me state the blindingly obvious. If an allegation is made that a crime has been committed then you report it to the police, outside the pages of a novel you don’t do it yourself. I can understand that the women involved may not have wanted it to go that far but that would have been their decision. So Evans went ahead with the flawed inquiry – Salmond would no doubt call it a kangaroo court – which cost the Scottish Government £500,000 in his legal costs and who knows how much internally?

And now this latest farce. Linda Fabiani has tried to keep it from being a revisitation of the trial but the fact that it is taking place makes that impossible. Politicians are always going to be politicians and seek to damage their opponents, that’s their oxygen, so when Murdo Fraser asked the inevitable question about whether civil servants were warned not to be alone with the former First Minister, ruling it out was absurd in a pantomime of absurdity.

I wasn’t at the Salmond trial and so I have no view to express. He was found not guilty on all counts and that should have been the end of it. Now, through this latest prolonged political replay, it’s all come back for the keyboard prosecutors to have, once again, their poisonous say. And when the final report is issued in who knows when there will be another chance to turn it all over. Just this isn’t.

Where is Boris?

They seek him here, they seek him there, he’s in a yurt but who knows where? Boris Johnson is apparently camping out in Scotland, providing an ample target for the midges and the critics, of course. He was absent during the flooding crisis in January, he had a handy case of Covid during the pandemic and now, during the current exam and immigrant crises, he’s once again missing. So he’s not that daft.

He’s not exactly camping out either, he’s in a three-bedroom cottage, but there is a tent in the garden. Perhaps this is for his armed, close protection officers? I just hope they aren’t wearing shorts and have sprayed themselves with midge repellent with smotherings of Marmite on their toast, which apparently repels the wee beasties as well as about half of the population.

Boris has been spotted with a balaclava and netting over his head but I’m reliably informed he has put in an order for these indigenous Harris Tweed repellents.

Rio high jinks

Nothing like this ever happens at Holyrood. At a meeting of the Rio de Janeiro council on Zoom, one of the participants forgot to switch off his computer and then proceeded to have sex with a partner, beamed live to the world while his fellow council members ignored the heaving buttocks to continue their discussion of rubbish collection and road repairs. Apparently the meeting continued for four hours after the coitus interruptus.

Smell the lavvie

I’ve no idea if the candle from Gwyneth Paltrow’s company smells like her vagina as I haven’t come close to either, nor have I encountered the follow-up, This Smells Like My Orgasm. But apparently there are all sorts of, er, interesting scented candles on the market. A range called Scents of Normality has The Cinema, The Local and The Festival, all places we couldn’t go during lockdown. The Festival apparently smells like cut grass, burned skin, warm cider, burger van, cannabis and just the merest shimmer of distant Portaloo. I’m thinking of marketing The Gemme, which will smell of urine, spilled Bovril, essence of Scotch pie with grace notes of perspiration.

Kiss and sue

A LONDON fitness instructor is demanding £138,000 from a woman he kissed on a date, claiming she gave him cold sores, or herpes simplex. Martin Conway says he developed the ulcers, flu-like symptoms and had to be taken to hospital after a panic attack. No gentleman is he, and a bit of a big girl’s blouse. The woman he is complaining against is called Lovelace. Just saying.

Rear occasion

KELVIN MacKenzie, the editor of The Sun who gave us the Gotcha headline over the sinking of the Belgrano and Up Yours Delors, has popped up again with the news that the Discovery Channel, in partnership with Rupert Murdoch, is to launch GB News, fronted by Andrew Neil and (hopefully not) Nigel Farage. It is taking on the “quite dreadful Sky News”, says Kel, which of course Murdoch used to own. “More people see my rear end than watch Kay Burley at breakfast,” he tweeted.

Footballers (again) behaving badly

THE Manchester United and England player Harry Maguire has been arrested in Greece for allegedly clobbering a police officer. It’s really par for the course from footballers at play, almost a rite of passage. Stuart Cosgrove’s book Hampden Babylon is a delicious compendium of what some of our lads have got up to.

Maguire’s japes are as nothing compared to that of Peter Beagrie, the undisputed champion of excess, who is now a pundit for Sky. In 1991, the then-Everton winger, on a bibulous night out in Spain on a pre-season tour, flagged down a motorcyclist in the early hours who gave him a lift back to his hotel. When he couldn’t wake the night porter, Beagrie commandeered the bike, opened the throttle and roared up the hotel steps and through a plate glass window. It was the wrong hotel and he needed 50 stitches.