Court case to examine Carmichael’s re-election
CONSTITUENTS who lodged a legal challenge against Northern Isles MP Alistair Carmichael’s re-election to Westminster are to have their day in court in Edinburgh later this year.
In what is thought to be the first case challenging an election result in Scotland since the 1960s, the Election Court will sit on 7-8 September in the Court of Session. A hearing to finalise arrangements, including whether the proceedings can be broadcast live, will take place on 31 August.
At a hearing in Edinburgh on Wednesday, Lady Paton – who will hear the case along with Lord Matthews – confirmed the case will be heard.
It stems from the leaking of a civil service memo wrongly suggesting that First Minister Nicola Sturgeon had told the French ambassador that she wanted David Cameron to remain UK Prime Minister. Both parties categorically denied that Sturgeon had made any remarks to that effect.
The leak took place in early April but the former Scottish secretary initially denied responsibility for it. Following a Cabinet Office investigation led by Sir Jeremy Heywood, Carmichael admitted that he had permitted his special adviser, Euan Roddin, to release details to the Daily Telegraph, which ran a story on 3 April.
On Monday the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) ruled that the Telegraph had breached the editors’ code by publishing a “substantially misleading” article.
The right-wing newspaper was ordered to publish IPSO’s ruling in page two of its print edition and online. However the original story (‘Nicola Sturgeon secretly backs David Cameron’) remains uncorrected on its website.
The petition, lodged by four of Carmichael’s Orkney and Shetland constituents, comes after the MP resisted strong pressure and public protests calling for him to resign and trigger a by-election.
They are challenging the result – which saw Carmichael hang on as the sole Liberal Democrat MP in Scotland by a margin of 817 votes over the SNP candidate Danus Skene – under Section 106 of the 1983 Representation of the People Act, which holds that releasing a false statement about the character and conduct of an election candidate is a criminal offence.
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More than £60,000 was raised through a crowd-funding effort online to cover the constituents’ legal costs.
When he admitted responsibility for the leak, Carmichael apologised and said he would have resigned as a minister had he still been in government and declined his ministerial severance payment.
On Sunday, Skene told Shetland News he believed the Conservatives may have decided to “hang Carmichael out to dry” after winning a surprise outright majority in May’s general election.
Meanwhile, the Cabinet Office has refused to divulge why it took seven weeks to publish the outcome of its inquiry. It claimed it was “in the public interest” to withhold the information as it could “seriously impact future investigations”. Shetland News is appealing against the decision, along with other news organisations.
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