My response to Chris McEleny's allegation that I defamed him in reference to his role in the 2023 Alba vote-rigging scandal (the short answer is: no I didn't)

I received an unsolicited email out of the blue a few hours ago from the Alba Party's disgraced former General Secretary, Chris McEleny, who was sacked and then expelled from the party due to his "gross misconduct".  Any email from him is the marker of a veritable red letter day, because as long-term readers of the blog will recall, I made umpteen efforts to obtain information and clarification from him during the sham "disciplinary" process against me in late 2024, but with one exception he simply ignored my emails.  Many other people had a similar experience.  It's lovely to see that he's belatedly located the "send" button in his email account.

The purpose of his message was to accuse me of defaming him in one specific sentence of my blogpost from Thursday night, entitled 'Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh: the ego has landed', and to demand that I delete the sentence.  As the name implies, the post is in fact primarily about Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh's role in the death of the Alba Party, not about McEleny's role, and indeed it only mentions McEleny once in passing.  However, he is claiming that I was factually inaccurate and defamatory when I said that Alex Salmond had involved him in the rigging of the 2023 Alba internal elections in order to ensure that Jacqueline Bijster and Denise Findlay, the rightful winners of the Membership Support Convener election and Organisation Convener election respectively, were not allowed to take office (or rather to retain office, because they were both incumbents).  There is no direct legal threat made against me, but presumably I'm supposed to infer that it's there by implication.

My view is that McEleny is trying it on here, and is basing his allegation of defamation on an unrealistically narrow definition of what the term "election-rigging" means.  That won't wash, because in numerous blogposts over the last year I have actually defined specifically what the nature of the rigging of the 2023 Alba internal elections was.  It did not involve literal falsification of election results (as far as we know, anyway - there have been vague rumours of falsification but nothing has ever been established).  What actually happened fell into the following three broad categories:

1) The 'pay-per-vote' system for electing ordinary members of Alba's NEC was exploited by a wealthy individual, who bulk-purchased dozens of votes which were effectively cast as a bloc.  The main purpose was to ensure that Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh comfortably topped the poll in the female ballot, and thus to make it less likely that any questions would be raised about her moral right to remain as Party Chair.  However, the tactic went badly wrong because the Tasmina voters also voted as a bloc for the little-known Abdul Majid, who by all accounts topped the male ballot by such an implausibly huge margin that if the results had been published, it would have been blindingly obvious that the process had been hopelessly tainted.  That was why the results were controversially kept secret, and why a variety of contradictory and unconvincing excuses were given for that decision (including by McEleny himself).

2) The Alba membership's decision to re-elect Denise Findlay and Jacqueline Bijster was thwarted by means of a cynical two-step plan.  Firstly the original results were nullified just before they were due to be announced, with an extremely elaborate and convoluted cover story put forward by Alex Salmond at the party conference to attempt to justify the voiding of elections that had been properly-conducted and fairly won.  Secondly, intolerable pressure was then to be put on the winning candidates to 'voluntarily' withdraw from the reruns of the elections, which it was obvious they were likely to win again.  As it turned out, this pressure was only necessary in the case of Ms Findlay, because Ms Bijster withdrew in disgust before any pressure had been really applied.  

3) Ms Bijster's name was unilaterally removed (according to her supporters by McEleny) from the list of candidates for female ordinary members of the NEC, even though she had only withdrawn from the rerun of the Membership Support Convener election and thus remained a properly-nominated candidate for the NEC.

In his email to me, McEleny has effectively disputed the third category by arguing that Ms Bijster was no longer eligible to stand because she had by then "publicly resigned from the party".  I very much doubt if that's true - it's certainly possible she was certified as having publicly resigned, but that's not the same thing as an actual public resignation, as numerous other victims of the McEleny Purges can readily testify.  However, that's an irrelevant point in this particular instance, because the sentence McEleny is complaining about does not relate to that part of the election-rigging.

The nub of the issue is whether McEleny played a significant role in thwarting the democratic decision of Alba members to re-elect Ms Bijster and Ms Findlay to their office bearer roles, and in spite of his protestations, the evidence confirms that he did.  He claims in his email that Alex Salmond made the decision to nullify the election results in agreement with the Party Chair (Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh) and the Depute Leader (Kenny MacAskill).  But that does not even tally with what Alex Salmond himself said in his announcement to conference at the time, when he stressed he had made the decision "after consultation with the General Secretary", ie. with McEleny.  The Party Chair and Depute Leader were not even mentioned.  (I have a transcript of the Salmond speech, before anyone tries to quibble.)

Furthermore, Mr Salmond did not in fact have the constitutional power to nullify the election, which under the party's rules was being administered by McEleny.  It would therefore have been impossible for Mr Salmond to improperly usurp McEleny's role in this way without McEleny's consent.  We can only speculate as to whether that consent was given willingly or grudgingly, but we know it was given because the only real alternatives to consent were for McEleny to either block Mr Salmond's decision, or to resign as General Secretary and make clear that his position had been left untenable by the leader's actions.  He did not take either course.  

Incidentally, there was an Alice Through The Looking Glass moment during the review of Alba's constitution in early 2024, of which I was a part.  It was suggested that we should probably change the constitution to allow the party leader to do things like unilaterally nullify internal elections, because Mr Salmond had made clear through his actions that he intended to do stuff like that, and it was a great pity he'd had to breach the constitution to do it!  None of the leadership loyalists - not Daniel Jack, not Suzanne Blackley, not Robert Slavin, not Shannon Donoghue, not Chris Cullen - disputed the fact that Mr Salmond had acted outside his constitutional powers, which by definition means that McEleny had permitted him to do so.

As far as the improper pressure on Denise Findlay to withdraw from the rerun of the election is concerned, McEleny openly admits in his email that this happened, but claims that he was not directly involved.  He portrays himself as having done nothing more than passively "listened in to the call" in which she was told to withdraw.  It's becoming something of a pattern for McEleny to try to get off the hook by saying "nothing to do with me, guv, I was just sitting there at the time, that's all".  It's amazing how often he just happened to be sitting there when these dreadful things were done.  However, it doesn't strike me as hugely important whether he's being honest about his passivity or not, because his key involvement in the voiding of a properly-conducted election is sufficient to demonstrate that the claim I made in Thursday's blogpost was true.

Nevertheless, McEleny has a long track-record of litigiousness, and defamation law in this country is known to often work unfairly against those who tell the truth but who don't have fabulous monetary resources to call upon.  I've therefore spent the last few hours considering carefully whether or not I should take any precautionary action simply to protect myself.  What I've decided to do is amend the wording of the sentence McEleny has complained about, not to change its meaning in any way, which was entirely accurate, but simply to introduce greater precision and to make clearer what is meant by election-rigging and by McEleny's own role in it.  I don't think he's going to be any happier with the new version, but that's not of any great interest to me - all I care about is making sure that nothing can be 'creatively misconstrued' and that I'm being accurate in the clearest possible manner.

I'd actually like to finish by offering McEleny some free advice, which of course he'll ignore.  I'm not sure he realises just how obviously he telegraphs his insincerity at times, and just how much of a handicap that is to going to be to his political ambitions, regardless of which party he ends up in.  Take for example the quote he gave to newspapers a couple of weeks ago when the Electoral Commission forcibly removed him as Alba's registered Nominating Officer.  He took his trademark claims of passivity to a new extreme by portraying himself as a private citizen, an 'umble electrician who was just minding his own business and who was being inexplicably picked on by the Alba leadership.  He claimed to be delighted to have been relieved of his burdensome duties as Nominating Officer, and that he had wanted to relinquish them voluntarily but had been totally unable to because Alba had failed to provide him with the paperwork in the required manner.  

Pretty much all of that is the polar opposite of the truth.  There's no doubt that he desperately wanted to remain Nominating Officer (even if we don't know exactly what he planned to do with the powers of that role) and will have been gutted when that wheeze unexpectedly didn't work out.  He is massively overestimating the stupidity of his fellow human beings if he thinks they can't see straight through him, but apparently that's exactly what he thinks.

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Stew on Twitter: "(PREDICTION: James will go very quiet from this point.)"

— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) November 21, 2025

Now be honest, Stew, do you REALLY think there's the remotest chance of that happening?  This looks set to be your worst prediction since the celebrated "I'm calling it now, Humza has lost" in early 2023.  And the competition is stiff.

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If the law is applied consistently, this should be a considerable worry for the countless MPs who have been given massive financial inducements to speak on behalf of Israel.https://t.co/t8Pqu3HWJd

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) November 21, 2025