"Mad Dog" is Primus Suspect for yet another leak to the Sunday Mail about the chaos within the Alba Party

Those of you who have read my lengthy email exchange with Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh from last spring will already have a sense of perhaps the most grotesque feature of the sickness at the heart of the Alba Party.  Before his dismissal, the disgraced former General Secretary Chris McEleny had dictatorial powers over Alba members.  He could suspend any party member at his own personal whim - making them instantly ineligible to stand in internal elections, for example, or to participate at conference.  He could also - and frequently did - arbitrarily veto any official complaints lodged by rank-and-file members about the behaviour of people in the party's elite.

And yet he was totally immune from accountability in a way that people with a tiny fraction of his powers were not.  As you can see from my exchange with Ms Ahmed-Sheikh, at the first hint of anyone trying to hold McEleny to account for blatantly abusing his powers, they were informed that they were not allowed to do so, because that would constitute beastly victimisation of someone who was no more than an 'umble, vulnerable employee, and the party simply couldn't afford to be taken to an employment tribunal by him.  It's not a bad set-up if you can wangle it, is it?  Having dictatorial powers over all members of a party, while being able to treat those members as your employers and use employment law against them if they try to fight back against your abuses.

Of course McEleny was only in this absurdly protected position because it suited the wider leadership for him to be there - it was of immense assistance in conducting the Stalinist purges of people who displeased them in whatever small way.  So there was a kind of poetic elegance to it when McEleny ended up using that cosy set-up as a weapon against the leadership themselves.  Although Alba look set to be nothing more than a footnote in Scottish political history, they will always, absolutely always, have the unique distinction of being the party in which the leader tried to sack the General Secretary, and the General Secretary responded by trying to suspend the leader on the grounds that sacking the untouchable General Secretary is a grievous disciplinary offence.  (Or to put it in McEleny's own terms, sacking him would expose the party to significant financial liabilities if he took legal action against them and won, and thus creating such exposure 'injured' the party and was a serious disciplinary matter.)

By that point McEleny had got so drunk on his own power and importance, and had got so used to the pseudo-legalistic justifications for his diktats going unchallenged, that he didn't anticipate what should have been blindingly obvious - ie. that the NEC were never going to allow an 'umble employee to suspend the *party leader* simply on the grounds that the party leader had tried to sack him.  Having received his long-overdue rude awakening, McEleny's faulty thinking has continued, and he's tried to take exactly the same hopeless case to the court of public opinion, or rather the court of the Alba membership.  Over the last few weeks, he's leaked a series of stories to the unionist press, the latest being the one in the Sunday Mail today, revealing the advice Alba received about the potential financial consequences of sacking him if he tried to appeal.

Apparently he genuinely anticipates that Alba members will react to this information by thinking to themselves: "WHAT?  MacAskill actually tried to sack the untouchable McEleny?  Has he taken leave of his senses?!  Our eyes were shut but now they are open!  We must rise up against the despot MacAskill and replace him with Ash Regan, who will restore the virtuous McEleny to his rightful place!"  Whereas anecdotally Alba members are in fact reacting in the opposite way - they think McEleny is a jumped-up little nobody and that MacAskill should be congratulated for belatedly cutting "Mr Unsackable" down to size.  They are appalled that McEleny is willing to drive Alba to financial ruin due to his own self-importance.

Whether McEleny realises it or not (and seemingly he doesn't), he's completely run out of road in the Alba Party and if he wants a political future it will have to be elsewhere.  But the person who does still have something to lose, and who is being tremendously damaged by McEleny's antics, is Ash Regan.  Somehow she's allowed herself to be convinced that embracing McEleny as some sort of martyr figure is the ticket to popularity in Alba, but it's actually going to cost her masses of votes in the leadership election, because party members are terrified (and with absolutely full justification) that she is intending to reappoint him to a senior position - perhaps Party Chair, perhaps 'Director of Operations'.  They're breathing a monumental sigh of relief for having got rid of him at last and the absolute last thing they want is a Mad Dog Restoration.

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Among those who have been bullied out of Alba over the last couple of years, there are mixed feelings about Craig Murray's recent blogpost. They are grateful to him for acknowledging that something has gone seriously wrong in the party, but they think he's falling into the trap of "both siding" the issue, by saying that the problem was caused both by an authoritarian leadership group and by an attempted insurrection against that group.  In reality there was no attempted insurrection - there was just Tasmina exploiting Alex Salmond's deep paranoia after his legal ordeal by cynically convincing him there was a faction within Alba trying to overthrow him.  That supposed rebel faction were actually the people who were most loyal to him - they practically idolised him and would have walked through fire for him, which was precisely why Tas regarded them as so much of a threat to herself.

There has also been deep disquiet about the revelation in the blogpost about how Mr Salmond reacted when Craig brought up the concerns that had been raised about the rigged NEC elections of December 2023.  Mr Salmond apparently said that one faction had been out-organised by another faction, and that they had nobody to blame for that but themselves.  Well, I can tell you that Mr Salmond claimed to me on the phone in September 2021 that the reason for the pay-per-vote system for NEC elections was to ensure that better-known people such as myself didn't have an unfair advantage, and that other candidates could level the playing field by mingling with conference delegates as the vote was taking place.  He certainly didn't mention anything about the real intention being to enable "factions" to jostle against each other with bulk vote-buying strategies.  That would have sounded like a somewhat less high-minded ideal.