What did she know and when did she know it? Well, we now know that Nicola Sturgeon knew about the sex allegations against her predecessor and long-time mentor, Alex Salmond, rather earlier than she has been prepared to admit.

An unfortunate lapse of memory. Could happen to anyone. The First Minister had other matters on her mind, in particular the Arctic Strategy which had been discussed at First Minister’s Questions the day the fateful meeting took place.

Having spoken to the Arctic Circle Forum earlier that year, I can confirm that relations with our northern near neighbours is an important issue. Though I don’t think it would have made me forget about my best friend and former boss being accused of attempted rape.

Nicola Sturgeon has thus “misled” Parliament, as the Tory substitute leader Ruth Davidson insisted last week. But does anyone care? It doesn’t appear to be damaging Ms Sturgeon’s personal standing or that of the SNP. Everyone’s attention is dominated by Covid. Where’s the vegan beef?

READ MORE: Alex Salmond inquiry: Nicola Sturgeon's evidence branded 'beyond belief' at FMQs

Well, some people do care – and not just the opposition parties. A lot of SNP folk are profoundly scunnered at what they are learning about the Salmond affair. Few seriously believe the First Minister, whose powers of memory are legendary, would forget about that March meeting with Geoff Aberdein, Salmond’s representative on Earth. Did it slip her mind because of the presence of political aides and other members of her staff?

Surgeon’s belated confessional chips further holes in the First Minister’s credibility. It follows the revelation that her husband, and party chief executive, Peter Murrell, had apparently been pressuring police to get a move on with Salmond, like some impatient public prosecutor.

The whole affair is a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, concealing a cock-up: the 2019 Court of Session fiasco. The Holyrood committee looking into the Salmond affair is trying to find answers. So far it has received incomplete testimony from officials who appear to have been afflicted with Sturgeon’s memory loss. MSPs have been denied sight of crucial documents that might fill in the gaps, even though Sturgeon promised the committee would have anything it needed.

It’s important to remember what this inquiry is about. It is not about retrying Alex Salmond – he has been acquitted of the 13 charges of sexual assault and harassment that were levelled against him, mostly by senior figures in the SNP. At issue is what led to the Scottish Government being told by a judge, Lord Pentland, in January 2019, that it had behaved “unlawfully and with apparent bias” in accusing Salmond of sexual misconduct in the first place.

No-one thinks Nicola Sturgeon was personally responsible for the botched and unlawful process that led to Alex Salmond being awarded £512,000 in exemplary costs. That remains on the desk of her Permanent Secretary, Leslie Evans, who devised the quasi-legal disciplinary procedure and handled the judicial review. The question is why Sturgeon was so determined to defend her errant civil servant, even acting as her human shield.

The First Minister’s former special adviser of 10 years, Noel Dolan, said publicly that Evans should have resigned. Imagine if the UK Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, had admitted to having unlawfully accused David Cameron of sexual crimes and had had to pay him substantial sums of public money? Heads would have been rolling all the way down Whitehall.

What on Earth was going on in St Andrew’s House? In her personal statement to the Holyrood inquiry last week, the First Minister shed some dim light on it. She said the whole affair “took place against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement” and Harvey Weinstein. The Scottish Government had to be seen to be acting in response to what she called “media reports about the prevailing culture [of sexual misconduct] in Holyrood”.

READ MORE: Alex Salmond affair: Holyrood inquiry told it can access court documents

In October 2017, the human rights lawyer Aamer Anwar had claimed there was a culture of sexual harassment in Holyrood and told The Herald on Sunday he’d heard “a catalogue of abuse”. So, Sturgeon authorised and very publicly approved Leslie Evans’s new civil service disciplinary code in late 2017. This applied retrospectively to former ministers – though not, apparently, to civil servants.

The Scottish Government was looking, as the BBC Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark put it in her documentary on the affair, for its own “MeToo moment”. Step forward Alex Salmond. Historic allegations made against him in 2013, which he claims had been resolved under the earlier complaints process, were revived, placing him under double jeopardy.

Perhaps he was supposed to go quietly, under a misogynistic cloud – but Alex Salmond is not a man who goes anywhere quietly. He resigned from the SNP, organised a crowdfunder and then launched a judicial review. He took the entire Scottish Government, including his protege, Nicola Sturgeon, to court. And, of course, he won in the most humiliating legal verdict received by any Scottish Government. “We may have lost the battle, but we will win the war,” texted Ms Evans after the result, insisting that this had nothing to do with Salmond.

The question now for the committee is why the Scottish Government didn’t collapse the judicial review before it got to the Court of Session. It seems likely that its legal advisers told them months before that they didn’t have a snowball’s chance of winning. We don’t know this, of course, it is only speculation. But since the Scottish Government is refusing to make public its legal advice, despite there being precedents for so doing, people have drawn their own conclusions.

This then raises the question of who put together the catalogue of de minimis sex allegations about Salmond and when exactly did they hand the dossier over to the police? These are the allegations that the jury dismissed in the High Court a year later. We know that many of the accusers were senior figures in the SNP and the Scottish Government.

Were they solicited? Was there collusion? Who was in the “SNP political bubble”, as Salmond’s defence lawyer put it. Were they handed to the police to forestall an embarrassing Court of Session case? What exactly was going on in the autumn of 2018? There are more loose ends than in a carpet factory.

The story has not exactly gripped the public imagination – at least not yet. This is partly because the media’s attention is otherwise engaged with Covid, and partly because there is no great sympathy for Salmond. It is also because the media is under very strict instructions from the courts not to say anything that could inadvertently reveal the identities of Salmond’s accusers.

But senior figures like the former justice secretary Kenny MacAskill and former health minister Alex Neill are suggesting openly that there was a crackpot conspiracy to bring Alex Salmond down. That overzealous and overpaid civil servants went to war with the former First Minister and lost. Perhaps out of misplaced loyalty, the First Minister opted to put herself in the firing line.

If she is shot down, it will have been her own making.