"But what motive could there possibly have been?"

My problem with the " vast conspiracy against Alex Salmond," theory is what was the motive?
He was a busted flush politically, he had lost his seat, so why would all of these people plot against him?
Not saying it didn't happen, I have no inside knowledge, but can't see a reason.

— James Doleman (@jamesdoleman) February 23, 2021

The people who try to paint Alex Salmond's supporters as irrational, tinfoil hat-wearing "alt-Nats" tend to incredulously make two claims: a) that there "isn't a shred of proof" of a conspiracy against Mr Salmond, and b) that there was no conceivable motivation for a conspiracy anyway. Well, I'll leave others to grapple with the question of whether there's any proof or not, but the idea that there was no possible motive is self-evidently daft.

First of all, the fact that Mr Salmond lost his seat in the 2017 general election did not mean he was a "busted flush politically".  He had suffered a political setback, but so had the large number of other SNP MPs who lost their seats in the same election - and yet several of those people either got their seats back at the 2019 election, or will be standing in winnable seats at the 2021 Holyrood election.  Mr Salmond could easily have made the same journey back to parliamentary politics if the investigation against him hadn't intervened - indeed he still could, albeit perhaps not under the SNP banner.

But there were voices in the SNP that very much wanted his defeat in Gordon to be the end of the road for him.  One reason was his decision to have The Alex Salmond Show broadcast on RT.  As we all know, there is a small but influential faction within the SNP group at Westminster that has a paranoid obsession with Russia, very much in the fashion of controversial journalist David Leask.  Any connection with the Russian state, no matter how absurdly tenuous, is regarded as a type of contamination.  That alone led to a conviction in certain quarters that Mr Salmond must never be a frontline SNP politician again.

But that's unlikely to be the main reason for the way that events unfolded.  More significant was the period of #MeToo and #IBelieveHer - the latter of which can have two distinct meanings for different people.  It can quite properly mean that if a woman makes an allegation of sexual assault, it should always be taken seriously and be scrupulously investigated.  But it can also, for some people, mean that if a woman makes an allegation of sexual assault, it is automatically true.  That's a mindset that is quite simply incompatible with the most fundamental priniciple of our justice system - ie. that no-one is guilty of any crime unless it has been proved beyond reasonable doubt.

If there was an assumption that the allegations against Mr Salmond must have been true, it's not hard to see why corners were cut and an unfair, biased investigation process was allowed to unfold - the ends justified the means, it might have been thought, to get long-overdue redress for female complainants.  Nicola Sturgeon and the people around her might have wanted to capture the zeitgeist of #MeToo by seizing an opportunity to demonstrate that no man was untouchable - not even the former First Minister, her own political mentor, the leader of the Yes campaign in the 2014 referendum.

But having overreached themselves with a tainted process for what they might well have thought was the best of motives, they may have then panicked about the political damage that would be done to them as a result of a legal defeat.  I've heard it suggested, and this is just an interpretation but it's not an especially implausible one, that they became concerned that Nicola Sturgeon's own position as SNP leader might be under threat as a result of the misjudgement, which by extension threatened the career prospects of her closest aides and advisers.  One possible way to head off the threat was to totally discredit Mr Salmond so that any victory he enjoyed at judicial review would be left looking like an unimportant technicality.  What would discredit him? Well, if you could ask around and come up with lots more allegations, that might do the trick, because people will think there's no smoke without fire.  But ultimately there's nobody quite so discredited as someone who has been tried, convicted and sent to jail.  It would obviously be a very serious matter for people to try to get a former colleague imprisoned for reasons of self-preservation, and I'm not in any position to say whether that happened.  But it's what I've heard suggested.  There may or may not have been a conspiracy, in which case there may or not have been a motive - but if you really can't see what motive there could possibly have been, well, there's your answer.

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If you missed my podcast chat with Dr Tim Rideout of the Scottish Currency Group on Monday, you can catch up with it HERE.