That unusual sound you can hear is jaws dropping to the floor across Scotland as Chris McEleny - that's CHRIS MCELENY - chooses this moment of all moments to pen a newspaper article about the vital importance of *due process*

For confidentiality reasons I won't reveal who this was or what the circumstances were, but during the Alba Party's McEleny Purges last year, one of my fellow members of the Disciplinary Committee had clearly been briefed by the leadership in advance of one of the show-trials (possibly by Mr McEleny himself) on a supposed flaw in the defence put forward by one of the Alba members facing punitive disciplinary action.  When he was building up to asking what he imagined to be his killer question, he unintentionally did a Lieutenant Columbo impersonation: "you see, I'm a little confused here, because..."

That very much sums up my own sentiment today as I ponder Mr McEleny's extraordinary decision (and extraordinarily timed decision) to write a newspaper column in The National about what he apparently learnt about the vital importance of due process during his legal battle with the Ministry of Defence a few years ago.  I'm a little confused here, Chris, because if you're just so darn passionate about due process...

1) Why did you abuse your position as General Secretary last year to push (successfully) for someone's expulsion from the Alba Party because he made an irreverent joke about you on Twitter?

2) Why did you ignore that individual's emails saying that he wished to take up his right under the rules to attend his disciplinary hearing?

3) Why did you instruct your deputy to falsely tell the Disciplinary Committee that the individual had expressed no desire to attend the hearing?

4) Why did you not immediately resign as General Secretary after your lie was brought to light, and why did the party chair instead threaten myself and two other members of the committee with disciplinary action for raising strong objections to your lie and to several other procedural irregularities?  (In true Orwellian fashion, the points of order we raised were reframed by Tasmina as "misogynistic bullying of the committee convener", and I'm genuinely not making that up.)

5) Why did you apparently ignore the expelled member's emails stating that he wished to take up his right to appeal against expulsion - a right which is absolute and unconditional under the Alba constitution?

6) Why did you (successfully) demand that the Disciplinary Committee take punitive action against a courageous whistleblower who brought to light potential evidence that the December 2023 NEC elections were partly rigged, rather than doing what you're supposed to do by ensuring that whistleblowers are fully protected?

7) Why were you not suspended from the Alba Party when you were facing a criminal trial for threatening behaviour, bearing in mind that you have shown no compunction whatsoever in arbitrarily suspending other Alba members for weeks or months on end because of trivial and unproven allegations?  Shouldn't due process preclude such blatant double standards in the treatment of different categories of members?

8) Why did you ask the NEC to remove me from my directly elected position on the Constitution Review Group, when there is no provision in the Alba constititution allowing the NEC to remove someone from a directly elected position on an a la carte basis?

9) Why have you just got me expelled from the Alba Party on secret charges that were sent to my fellow members of the Disciplinary Committee but not to me?  (To this day, all I know is that, at a minimum, the secret charges related to fourteen blogposts on Scot Goes Pop, but I have no idea which fourteen posts were being referred to or what the hell was supposed to be so wrong with them.)

10) Why was it possible for a secret witness to be called at the hearing which decided on my expulsion, without me having any knowledge of a) the fact that a witness was called at all, b) the identity of that witness, and c) what that witness said?  Why was I given no possible opportunity to challenge or dispute what that witness said?  (In case you're wondering, I found out the identity of the witness, but only by complete accident because a committee member happened to mention it in one of his questions to me.  The committee convener, the leadership loyalist Josh Robertson, clearly had absolutely no intention of even informing me that a witness had been called.)

11) Why did your charge sheet against me reference the section of the social media policy relating to "abusive behaviour" on social media, but without giving a single example of me behaving abusively on social media?

12) Why did you ignore my emails asking you to either specify examples (if any existed) of me being abusive on social media, or to delete that section of the charge sheet?

13) How was it even possible that the "abusive behaviour" section of the social media policy was one of the three grounds for expulsion the Disciplinary Committee cited in reaching their decision, when you had failed to find a single example of abusive behaviour on social media?  Is "look, take my word for it, guys, he's said some awful stuff" really sufficient for expulsion in the Alba Party?

I mean, I could go on and on here, but if you could answer those questions for starters, that would be grand.