Shock! Conspiracy!

An official British memo has leaked to the Daily Telegraph giving the uncontroversial opinion that ‘Ed Miliband is not PM material’. The author of this memo is not yet a matter of public record, although no doubt the FOI requests are flooding in, and will be answered after the election.

The issue? The person opining via the memo on E Miliband’s un-PM materialism is said to be Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish National Party leader. Ooops.

Here is the text of the memo as published.

Points to note.

The Telegraph describes it as an ‘official British Government memorandum’. This is interestingly ambiguous – if it were (say) an FCO memo they surely would say so. BUT it might be part of an FCO memo eg from an FCO SpAd to a No 10 SpAd that has been copied into the text from another document originally recording the conversation concerned.

It’s not clear if it is the full memo or just part of it. It finishes in an oddly abrupt way after a bullet-point, suggesting that the Comment or Next Steps concluding paragraph(s) has been cut, either by the person doing the leaking or by the Telegraph for its own purposes.

There is no reason to think that the French Consul General in Edinburgh M Coffinier would be at pains to brief anyone in Whitehall/London on the goings-on in Scotland. It would be very odd if not freakishly bizarre if he did so. Hence this is almost certainly a record of a conversation between M Coffinier and someone somewhere high (and well-disposed to the French CG) in the Scottish system. This is in fact obvious from the substance – the bulk of the memo as in the Telegraph is all about nuts and bolts Scotland/France/EU business as pursued by the French ambassador on her first visit to Scotland as such, with the Sturgeon/Miliband passage added as a general amusing thought towards the end.

The tone/style of the memo are authentic and practical. It even questions the accuracy of the CG’s account of the Sturgeon views on E Miliband (if MI5 forgers are capable of adding glosses like this they will win the Nobel Prize for Creative Writing):

I have to admit that I’m not sure that the FM’s tongue would be quite so loose on that kind of thing in a meeting like that, so it might well be a case of something being lost in translation.

The deranged idea promoted by our old comrade Craig Murray that this is a Zinoviev-letter style MI5/MI6 forgery is best described as, well, deranged. Craig (for readers who have not been paying attention) is an eccentric former British ambassador who got too close to the sexy daughter of the Uzbek dictator. He now attracts a wide following by talking utter Leftist nonsense in a loud voice.

How did this text  into the fall into the hands of the Daily Telegraph? My guess is that the memo was copied to Whitehall as it had practical interest on various foreign policy matters, and found its way to a gleeful SpAd and thence into the UK media.

And, of course, the denials gush forth:

The Telegraph claimed that the allegation was contained in a leaked UK government memorandum, thought to come from the Foreign Office, which sets out an official account of the meeting from France’s experienced consul general in Edinburgh, Pierre-Alain Coffinier.

But Coffinier told the Guardian that this was untrue. He said he had checked his notes of that meeting, which took place at Holyrood after first minister’s questions on 26 February. “I have looked at my notes and absolutely no preference has been expressed by anyone regarding the outcome of the election,” he said. “Which suggests neither Nicola nor my ambassador said anything.”

Note the meticulous formulation there. The French CG says that his notes of the meeting revealed ‘absolutely no preference about the outcome of the election’ which ‘suggests’ (sic) that neither Sturgeon nor the Ambassador said anything. All possibly true (enough). But so what? Notes of a meeting would not necessarily include jocular asides about sensitive political issues, and in any case that has nothing to do with what the CG might have said on the telephone to catch his interlocutor’s attention. That way of putting it looks like a cunning Gallic way to deflect attention from what happened (and to save his own skin?) by appearing to answer the question while in fact talking about something else entirely.

Conclusion?

Obviously authentic memo, even if we do not know if we have seen all of it.

The memo appears to record in some detail (and accurately) what was said by the French CG in that telephone-call. Did everything the French C say accurately (enough) reflect much of what was covered in the French Ambassador’s meetings in Scotland? No reason to think not.

But (crucially) did the French CG over-egg the pudding or somehow not get the sense of Sturgeon’s words quite right in mentioning that sensitive political angle? Maybe!

However, it is overwhelmingly likely that Sturgeon DID say something along those lines to the French ambassador (eg quietly while strolling out of the meeting or otherwise in the margins or on a ‘please don’t note this down!’ basis), to the point where the French CG found that remark specifically worth mentioning in his later telephone debriefing for Scottish colleagues.

Conclusion?

At least one person in the British system is still able to write a more or less cogent and helpful record of conversation.