SNP's disastrous week in Court of Session shows how Scotland's ruling clique thought they were untouchable – Brian Wilson

How much more public money will Humza Yousaf waste on court cases his government is always going to lose?

Is Humza Yousaf still such a prisoner of Nicola Sturgeon that he will continue her doomed legal battles? (Picture: Fraser Bremner/pool/Getty Images)

“Scottish Government lose legal action over gender reform.” Well, there’s a shocker! But enough of irony. This wholesale squandering of public money on defending lost causes is in itself a public disgrace. The SNP have no difficulty joining the chorus of condemnation when Tories seek to circumvent the rule of law in pursuit of their Rwandan fetish. Yet in their own backyard, they display the same contempt for legal process whenever it becomes an inconvenience.

For the second time this week, the crème de la crème of Scottish legal talent invited the Court of Session to go through the motions of a process from which the outcome was never in doubt. In each case, Humza Yousaf had the chance when he became First Minister to break with the tainted legacies of his predecessor. It could scarcely be clearer that Scottish public opinion has no truck with the Gender Recognition Reform Bill which Holyrood was daft enough to pass.

Whatever the motives of those who supported it, the interface with reality has exonerated all the warnings offered by women who campaigned against it. Attempts to present the intervention of the Scottish Secretary, Alister Jack, as a constitutional outrage failed miserably. So why not cut his losses? Instead, Mr Yousaf and company remain so thirled to the Sturgeon legacy that they pressed ahead with an appeal for judicial review, running up costs so far of a quarter of a million pounds and counting. For what?

The Scottish Government’s other Court of Session failure was, in a sense, more interesting because it was not about defending a policy, however flawed. Rather, it was part of the long-running saga over the process surrounding the prosecution, and subsequent acquittal, of Alex Salmond.

The services of James Mure KC and Paul Reid KC do not come cheaply and in time we might be allowed to know how much it cost the Scottish Government’s budget to parade them in the Court of Session this week on another fool’s errand predestined for failure. It would certainly have been enough to fund a few food-banks or employ enough classroom assistants in a poor area of Scotland to make a life-changing difference. Once politicians are consumed by their own untouchability to the point where there is no sensitivity to such choices, it is time for them to go.

The cause in which Messrs Mure and Reid were employed was to convince a bench of Scotland’s senior judges that Scotland’s Information Commissioner should be overruled on his decision that evidence to the James Hamilton inquiry into Nicola Sturgeon’s conduct should be made public.

It is an old story that will not go away for as long as Mr Salmond has breath in his body. Whatever one thinks of the former First Minister, politically or socially, it is not difficult to understand why. Throughout these incongruous events, a man’s liberty was at stake and those who pursued him did so with the intention of depriving him of it.

The case which Messrs Mure and Reid were hired to argue might be called “the Father Ted defence” – that the evidence in question was only resting in the Scottish Government’s account and really belonged to James Hamilton. Therefore, it was not within their powers to release it into the public domain even if they wanted to.

The judges did not trouble to adjourn before throwing this nonsense into the judicial bin. In response, the Information Commissioner, David Hamilton, described it as “a good day for Freedom of Information” though “extremely frustrating that tens of thousands of pounds of precious public funds have been spent on this case”. Yousaf’s refusal to accept the FoI ruling had caused “unnecessary pressure for my office”, said David Hamilton, and “so far… an additional and ongoing delay of more than eight months” in releasing the information sought.

“In light of this”, he added, “I would strongly recommend that the Scottish Government take immediate steps to ensure this matter is resolved as swiftly as possible.” That plea brings the story up to date, for Mr Yousaf must now decide whether to comply or engage in further months of subterfuge to keep the information out the public domain.

If the latter happens, two obvious questions will grow in the public mind. First, what is in the evidence that they are going to such inordinate lengths to conceal? And second, is Mr Yousaf still such a prisoner of Ms Sturgeon that he is unable to break clear even when the case for doing so has been confirmed in the Court of Session?

The operation to “clear” Ms Sturgeon and her inner circle of wrong-doing in the lead-up to the Salmond case was a master-class of spin. The findings of a Holyrood committee, which concluded that she had misled the Scottish Parliament, were leaked in order to rubbish them in advance. As for the independent adjudicator, James Hamilton’s remit was set so narrowly as to make its headline finding inevitable.

Even then, the former Irish prosecutor – who presumably did not appreciate the deviousness of the vipers’ nest he had entered – protested vigorously when his report was ruthlessly redacted, to deprive it of context and meaning. It is unlikely he would have lost any sleep over this week’s Court of Session ruling.

The cumulative effect of these stories and others like them is to force the conclusion that Scotland has, over the past decade, been run as a conspiracy in which a ruling clique believed they could behave exactly as they pleased, without regard for legal or Parliamentary propriety. At the end of a disastrous week in the courts, the question for Mr Yousaf is whether he will continue to defend that culture, regardless of cost to the public purse and, ultimately, to his own fragile reputation.