Tommy Sheridan trial: How home truths ended futile fight to clear name

Published on Thursday 23 December 2010 17:32

Even second time around, there was only one show in town when Tommy Sheridan rolled into court.

• Tommy Sheridan, centre, was convicted of perjury after a 12 week trial at the Glasgow high court. Picture: Getty

The reserved Court of Session in Edinburgh had never seen the like, when Sheridan's defamation trial against the News of the World, with a heady mix of sex and politics, burst upon it four years ago.

And although the High Court in Glasgow has had more than its fair share of historic moments, the 2 million perjury case spawned by that civil litigation along the M8 was still something special.

Of course, the big difference was the outcome in the two cases.

Back then there was the fairytale ending, the triumphant march into the sunshine with a loyal wife, Gail, beaming at his side, and the victory speech with the football sound bite. Winning against the Sunday tabloid was like Gretna beating Real Madrid, Sheridan declared.

Now the verdict has gone against him, he faces a jail term of some years and his political ambitions must surely be stone dead. And the comparison on this occasion is, of all things, between the arch socialist and the Tory peer - Sheridan following the same path to shame as Jeffrey Archer.

It all began in the autumn of 2004. The Scottish Socialist Party with Sheridan at the helm had never had it so good. The SSP had won six seats in the Scottish Parliament at the previous year's election, and the party was buoyant.

But the feel-good factor was about to be shattered. Talk of Sheridan's philandering had been circulating almost before the ink had dried on his wedding certificate in 2000. And even when the rumours began to attract headlines, it was in the style so beloved of the red-top press - name nobody but drop enough hints to let everyone know who it is.

The News of the World's "sex columnist", Anvar Khan, had a book in the offing, titled Pretty Wild and dubbed "the most honest diary about men, women and sex you'll ever read". In a chapter on "the etiquette of orgy", Ms Khan recounted a trip she had made to Cupid's, a swingers' club in Manchester. Only pseudonyms were used, but she alleged to the paper's editor that the trip had been with Tommy Sheridan.

On 31 October, 2004, the front page of the News of the World screamed: "Married MSP is spanking swinger."

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The article set tongues wagging, and the SSP hierarchy called an emergency meeting amid fears that Sheridan was the "spanking swinger". The meeting, and what did or did not happen at it, was to become one of the key issues in both trials. One version was that Sheridan had confessed, but had insisted there was no proof against him and that he intended suing the News of the World if it went further in future articles and named him. The other account was that he had made no such admission, and that those who said he had were liars and part of a plot to oust him as party leader.

Either way, he stood down as national convener after the meeting, rejecting that it had anything to do with his private life and citing a desire to devote more time to his pregnant wife and their child.

Sheridan was right to have anticipated more articles. For some time, the paper had been cultivating an expose of the man who liked to cultivate an image of a clean-living, non-drinking, devoted husband.

The source was Fiona McGuire, a former escort girl and SSP activist from Peterhead who had let slip to a local freelance journalist that Sheridan was more to her than simply the party leader.

The News of the World leaned heavily on mum-of-three Ms McGuire to dish the dirt for 20,000 and, on the weekend after Sheridan's resignation "for family reasons", it ran Ms McGuire's allegation of an affair under the banner headline: "My kinky four-in-a-bed orgy with Tommy".

Sheridan did as he had threatened, and announced he was going to sue. The News of the World then received some assistance from a very unexpected source. Anne Colvin, a middle-aged Glasgow grandmother, got in touch to say she knew something about the MSP that it might find useful.Mrs Colvin recalled that in 2002 she had found herself, through a friend of a friend, agreeing to go to "a VIP party" in Glasgow's Moat House Hotel. The hotel was next to the SECC, popular venue for rock concerts, and she had thought there was just the chance that the party might have been for somebody really famous.

After being shown to a suite, nothing seemed to be happening and she decided to have a nose about, and opened a door. She said Sheridan and another man were having sex with a woman.

Mrs Colvin's testimony was important to the News of the World's defence of Sheridan's claim for defamation. However, perhaps its most important witness was a woman about whom not a word had been written in the paper.

Katrine Trolle, a Dane, had joined the SSP after coming to Scotland about 15 years ago, and stood as a candidate in the 2003 Scottish Parliament election. She had been named to the News of the World in an attempt to divert its attention from Fiona McGuire, but when doorstepped by the paper, she vehemently denied any-thing other than a political relationship with Sheridan, and interest in her had waned, at least so far as a story was concerned.

However, under citation to attend court and the threat of a perjury charge, she testified in the Court of Session to an affair spanning four years that had started in Sheridan's home while his wife of a few months was at work. She said they had sex around half a dozen times, once in a threesome, and she had also gone to Cupid's with him.

Sheridan gave a masterly performance in the Court of Session, after sacking his lawyers and going it alone. He showed himself to be an accomplished and practised orator, someone who could almost mesmerise his listeners.

And his wife's "I stand by my man" evidence was just as impressive, delivered forcefully and with passion.

Although three women - Khan, McGuire and Trolle - all said Sheridan had cheated on his wife with them, and as many as 11 witnesses from the SSP testified that he had confessed at "the meeting" to using a swingers' club, the jury found in favour of Sheridan. He was awarded 200,000, a record for defamation in Scotland.The paper immediately announced an appeal. Of greater urgency, however, were comments made by the judge, Lord Turnbull, during the trial, who said: "It seems to me pretty much inevitable there will have to be a criminal inquiry at the conclusion of this case into the question of whether witnesses have committed perjury. Witnesses who have committed perjury would be liable to be sentenced to imprisonment for a lengthy period."