Alba's controversial Ayrshire councillor finally breaks his silence on the latest corruption scandal - but his boilerplate statement raises more questions than answers as he fails to provide clarity on any dealings or contact he may have had with disgraced former council chief Martin Dowey

A few days ago, I blogged about the mounting pressure on Chris Cullen, who is one of Alba's two local councillors due to having been elected as an SNP councillor before switching parties.  Cullen has become popularly known as "the Crossmaglen Columbo" due to his thick Armagh accent and his unintentional impersonation of Peter Falk's beloved TV character when he was pre-briefed to attempt a "Gotcha" on one of the victims of the McEleny Purges at a disciplinary hearing last year.

There have been increasing calls in recent days for Cullen to explain any dealings or contact he may have had with the disgraced former South Ayrshire Council leader, Martin Dowey of the Tories, who was forced to resign after a recording emerged of him promising multi-million pound contracts to his "pals".  It's thought by many that at the very least there must have been some sort of informal deal between Cullen (who owns a local joinery business) and Dowey, because around six months ago the ruling Tory group on the council randomly appointed Cullen as the chair of a key committee.  To state the bleedin' obvious, the Tories do not do favours to small pro-indy parties out of the kindness of their hearts, so the assumption is that Cullen must have agreed to do something in return - with one plausible possibility being that he privately committed himself to voting with the Tories on key council votes.

Extraordinarily, the councillor who was previously chair of the committee before the Tories replaced him with Cullen, asked recently for Dowey to name the members of the administration - with the clear implication being that he suspects that Cullen is now regarded as a full part of the administration, and that South Ayrshire is now run by a Tory-Alba coalition, but that this information is being kept secret from the public due to obvious 'presentational' difficulties.

I know many Alba members felt from the start that the apparent Tory-Alba deal was always unacceptable, but their patience has well and truly snapped now that the council administration is engulfed in the corruption scandal.  They want Cullen to break off the deal, and if he is not willing to do that, they at least want him to come clean on what the nature of the deal is, why he agreed to it, whether he is now effectively accepting the Tory whip, and whether Alba is getting anything at all out of it.  Is it really nothing more than the personal status and title Cullen gets from being a committee chair?

He has at long last broken his silence on the scandal in a newspaper interview, but in a classic deflection tactic that will be all too familiar to those of us who have dealt with him in Alba's internal structures, he hasn't commented on his own responsibility or involvement, but has instead attempted to self-righteously tone-police his fellow councillors, accusing them of "in-fighting over appointments" and "trading immature barbs across the chamber".  I'm afraid, Chris, that voters are actually far more interested  in the nature of those appointments and the grubby deals that lie behind them.

So why did he do it?  In my own personal opinion, based on my limited but unpleasant past experience of the man, I'd say it was sheer careerism.  As regular readers of this blog know, Cullen has a track record in Alba's internal politics of taking a "whatever it takes to get me the committee role" approach.  He abused his position on a working group reviewing the Alba constitution, and indeed his partner Shannon Donoghue's position on the same group, to quietly change the rules to guarantee himself an appointed position on Alba's ruling National Executive Committee (NEC).  He then stood for election (unsuccessfully) to two separate positions on the NEC, without bothering to mention to people that it didn't actually matter whether they voted for him or not, because he and Shannon had already "sorted it".  A man prepared to act as cynically as that in his own self-interest would not, I'd suggest, think twice about entering into a grubby backroom deal with the Tories just to bag himself a title as a committee chair.

Incidentally, if you live in the Ayr East ward and are 'lucky' enough to be represented by Cullen, you can catch up with his tireless work on your behalf at his official website, which was updated as recently as five years ago, when in chronological order he was within just one party of his current one.  There's also some copied-and-pasted information about local history - gripping stuff.