MP begins legal battle to keep his job

LAWYERS acting for northern isles MP Alistair Carmichael have begun their fight to resist attempts to use the courts to remove him from office.

Four Orkney constituents raised more than £61,500 through a crowd funding campaign to go to Edinburgh’s Court of Session to challenge his election in May.

At a procedural hearing on Thursday, Carmichael’s QC Roddy Dunlop said he would be putting forward legal arguments proving no laws had been broken.

Judges Lady Paton and Lord Eassie continued the hearing until next Wednesday to look into “administrative issues” before deciding when the case should go ahead.

Both sides agreed the hearing should take place in Edinburgh and transmitted to Kirkwall via videolink as there was no dispute over the facts of the case and therefore purely a matter of legal argument.

Jonathan Mitchell QC, acting for the constituents, said he hoped the case could be dealt with before the September parliamentary recess.

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The election petition raised by Timothy Morrison, Phemie Matheson, Fiona Grahame and Carolyn Welling is thought to be the first case of its kind for 50 years.

They are using the 1983 Representation of the People’s Act to argue Carmichael is not fit to hold office after he leaked a confidential government memo to the Daily Telegraph one month before the general election and then lied about it on an interview broadcast on Channel Four.

The memo claimed Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon had told the French ambassador in private that she would prefer David Cameron to be elected prime minister, contrary to what she was saying in public.

The Cabinet Office swiftly launched an inquiry into the leak and two weeks after the election announced that Carmichael had admitted being involved.

Carmichael apologised to Sturgeon and the ambassador for any embarrassment he may have caused and gave up the severance pay he would have been due as secretary of state for Scotland.

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Jonathan Mitchell QC, acting for the constituents, said this behaviour called into question the MP’s integrity and suitability to represent his constituency at Westminster.

The petition claims his actions were designed to have an impact on the outcome of the election.

However Carmichael maintains this was not the case and there was no breach of the legislation.

The MP said that he believed at the time it was in the public interest to release the memo given its significance and the credibility of the source, an unnamed civil servant.

He acknowledged this had been “an error of political judgment”, but insists his actions were not designed to affect the outcome of the election.

At the end of Thursday’s hearing, well known campaigner Stuart Hill from Cunningsburgh stood up to challenge the jurisdiction of the court by insisting that Shetland was not part of Scotland.

Lady Paton said that she could not listen to him because he was not part of these proceedings.