ALBA CLUEDO EASTER SPECIAL - Damning *audio* evidence of Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh's ties to Reform UK is leaked to The Sun, leaving Alba members up and down the land with just one question on their lips: HAS "MAD DOG" GONE FULL TONTO?

Let's imagine, and of course I'm speaking purely hypothetically here, that there was until recently a rogue employee within the Alba Party.  Let's imagine he had full access to the secretive meetings of the party's ruling National Executive Committee (NEC) - not because he was an elected member of the NEC himself, but because the nature of his job allowed him to attend all of the meetings.  And let's suppose he did something just a little bit naughty by secretly recording all of the meetings without the participants' knowledge, just in case it proved useful later on.

Now let's suppose something changed for our hypothetical rogue employee.  Maybe he was sacked, for example, and it left him with a severe grudge against the party.  Maybe he even found himself facing disciplinary action and possible expulsion from the party.  Can you guess how he'd react in that situation?  Might he pass an excerpt of one of those NEC recordings to a tabloid unionist newspaper?  Might he choose a particularly damaging excerpt, not because the damage serves any real purpose in itself, but as a form of implied blackmail - ie. to indirectly let the Alba leadership know that he has all of these recordings in his possession, and that if they don't back off from expelling him, pretty much any unwise comment that was ever made by anyone in any NEC meeting over the last four years is likely to end up on the front page of The Sun?

How fortunate that all of the above is such a fanciful scenario and that it couldn't possibly happen in the real world.  Mind you, it does have to be said that yesterday we discovered that Alba's disgraced former General Secretary, Chris "Mad Dog" McEleny, had been officially suspended from the party, and then today an audio recording from an NEC meeting in which Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh made private comments revealing her close ties to Reform UK's deputy leader Richard Tice, mysteriously found its way to The Sun.  It also has to be said that McEleny has a long track record of leaking confidential information to unionist newspapers in an effort to harm his Alba colleagues.  But I'm sure that's all just a complete coincidence and that we shouldn't be reading anything into it.

Personally, I think the leaker to The Sun, "whoever that person may be", "what a total mystery this is", etc, etc, is misjudging human nature.  I think now that the disciplinary proceedings are actually underway, blackmail will prove relatively ineffective.  It might have been more effective before the Alba leadership went public with the breakdown in relations with this individual, but now that they've already charted a course, they're unlikely to be deflected from it.  The disgruntled employee's "nuclear deterrent" has already failed, and now all he can do is decide whether or not to fire off his retaliatory missiles just for the sheer hell of it.

And I suspect he might just do that.  Vladimir Putin once made a chilling comment about the circumstances in which he would order the use of Russia's nuclear weapons.  He said that as a Russian citizen he couldn't see the purpose of the world continuing to exist if it didn't have Russia in it.  I think Chris McEleny has reached a similar conclusion.  I think he believes there is no point in the Alba Party continuing to exist if Chris McEleny isn't a member of it, or indeed if Chris McEleny doesn't have a very senior role within it.  I think he has more less set his mind on destroying Alba - although of course for presentational reasons he'll carry on pumping out his usual fare of tedious supportive tweets, in the hope that his hand won't be seen to be on the knife.

As someone suggested on the previous thread, Alba's Cold War may have just gone hot - and the battle that follows might well finish the party off for good.

A couple of other fairly obvious observations about all of this.  The initial complaint against me that eventually led to my expulsion from Alba (which was almost certainly cooked up by Chris Cullen and Shannon Donoghue, but was nominally fronted by Hamish Vernal) related to a supposed "breach of the confidentiality of a committee meeting".  And yet the blogpost in which that breach was alleged to have occurred was an extremely generalised piece which, as you can see, didn't reveal anything at all about what had happened at any committee meeting.  Can you imagine what the reaction would have been if I had actually made a recording of the meeting and given it to a unionist newspaper?  The Alba elite would have gone absolutely berserk.  Well, somebody has just done the equivalent of that, and that person ("who could it possibly be?", "totally baffling", etc, etc) should realise that they've made their own expulsion utterly inevitable, and that their past status won't protect them.

Secondly, the content of the leaked recording makes Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, and indeed Alex Salmond, look a bit delusional, because for some bizarre reason they clearly thought the Alba Party, which has been a catastrophic electoral failure throughout the four years of its existence so far, had something to offer the relatively successful Reform UK in terms of strategic advice.  That doesn't come as a major surprise to me, because when I was on the Alba NEC in 2021-22, I saw Alex Salmond make comments about how he thought there was strong evidence the party was firmly on course to win list seats in 2026, and I could tell from his body language and his tone of voice that he genuinely believed it.  It's one thing making comments like that for public consumption to keep morale up, but when you're actually starting to believe your own propaganda, it's a bit concerning.  

The Alba leadership have been stuck in the bunker for a long, long time now.