Veteran readers will recall my various pieces here about former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan turned voluble radical contrarian, Craig Murray. Read them all here.

He is back in the news again, in what the Scots wittily term a braw stooshie (fine old ding-dong). His bid to run as a candidate for the Scottish National Party in the 2015 UK general elections has been rejected by the SNP:

“While you showed excellent qualities, you could not give a full commitment on group discipline issues, and for that reason the panel could not recommend approval … There is scope to appeal this decision.”

Here is Craig giving his side of this story:

The Scotsman had already been alerted to the story and been briefed in some detail from within the SNP, in a manner plainly hostile to me. Exactly the same had happened, with the same Scotsman journalist, when I first started to pursue my candidacy a few weeks ago. I therefore decided to get out what had happened from my perspective, using social media.

I had written on 26 December an email to the SNP suggesting we develop an agreed media line to get out the fact I had been rejected as a candidate in a way that did as little mutual harm as possible … I never received a reply to that email to the SNP. Instead someone in the SNP briefed The Scotsman against me.

That the corporate media would use this episode to damage both me and the SNP was entirely predictable. But it was not me who called the media in, and it is not in my nature to kow-tow humbly when I am being attacked.

Whose side are we on here?

On the whole, I suspect that the SNP has made a wise decision in the greater interests of Scotland (and indeed the general sanity of UK public life). The whole point about Craig is that he does not do Group Discipline. His principles and the objects thereof swing wildly in different directions (see his monumental yet droll hypocrisy on the always fascinating subject of Gulnara Karimova), but when he has views he promotes them beyond tenaciously.

Is he likely to toe the line with the Whips of the SNP when a difficult vote comes up in Parliament and party discipline is required, if his principles tell him not to do so?

Of course not! That’s his undoubted charm.