Tommy Sheridan versus News International - the first five days
I have attended on all of the first 5 days of Tommy’s defamation case, although I missed most of Thursday due to my daughter’s graduation. I am providing this summary, and any subsequent updates I can manage, for signatories of the SSP Members Open Letter, as mediated by Anne Macleod. I have been requested to do so by several signatories. It is intended to counteract mainstream media bias and selectivity, and it is not aimed at distribution or publication beyond these signatories, and certainly not intended in any way to influence the outcome of the jury of 12’s deliberations. Where views are expressed they are strictly my own, as formed during experience of the case.
The case is being held in Court 6 of the Court of Session in the Lawnmarket in Edinburgh, in a very small courtroom holding only 18 members of the public. Court 6 is the only one with high-tech equipment that allows instantly-visible stenography and also the electronic display of documents and videos. Thus far the family and supporters of Tommy have occupied the majority of these 18 seats, with a few going to inveterate court addicts and several to SSP members aligned elsewhere. Anyone wishing to attend should arrive before 9am in the morning and by 1.20 pm in the afternoon - even then there is no guarantee. There are mid-morning and mid-afternoon breaks, at around 11.30 and 3, but very few seats change hands once a session has started.
During the first 5 days there have been only 7 witnesses, all called by the defenders of the action, News International. 4 of the witnesses have been paid workers for the News of the World, the Scottish news editor, Douglas Wight, where ‘news’ is used in a wholly new way, 2 stringers, Alan Caldwell and Ken Adams, and a relationships adviser, Anvar Khan, who is very touchy if you call her a ‘sex columnist’. The evidence of these 4 can be described in various ways. Inventive. Uncorroborated. Colourful. Laughable. We, Joe and Jo Public, were warned on the very first day by Lord Caldwell, the presiding judge, for laughing at it. We would be ejected from the court for intimidating witnesses, he said. On the second day, he warned us again. Only this time, it was the jury who started the laughing. Yesterday, as Anvar Khan’s credibility collapsed, it was the judge who was cracking jokes. I wonder if we might stop there, said Tommy’s QC at 4.15, it’s been a hot day. Yes, it is hotting up, said Lord Caldwell, shall we continue, for another ten minutes say?
The 2 stringers fed the News of the World with uncorroborated hearsay, in one case from an anonymous source. This is what has been appearing luridly in the daily press and media bulletins as though it is ‘fact’. Do not be dismayed, comrades. I have no doubt the jury knows a farrago of shite when it sees and hears it. It is unfortunate but predictable that the demolition of the credibility of these total non-witnesses by Tommy’s QC, Richard Keen and by his number two Mr Henderson, has hardly appeared in the media. After all, much of the prurient but more legally-timid Scottish media is very glad to up their sales on the back of the News of the Screws, whose Scottish news editor, Douglas Wight, has blatantly admitted in court that he tells lies to his clients to extract ‘stories’. He also , of course, pays them, with £20K being seen as a ‘low’ payout.
The other 3 witnesses, unfortunately, have been prominent members of the SSP. Whatever ‘defiance strategy’ may have been erected two months ago for the temporary non-release of dubious SSP ‘documents’ to the bourgeois courts, this seems now to have collapsed like a wet sand-dune. Alleged private conversations with and about Tommy Sheridan have been retailed to the courts, sometimes with a brief show of resistance, as in the case of Alan McCombes; sometimes with a histrionic catch in the voice as though to say, ‘This is all so sad, but I have to say it’; as in the case of Allison Kane; and sometimes showing astonishing evidence of probable prior collusion with the News of the World’s legal team, as was the case yesterday with Keith Baldassara.
All 3 of these comrades may confidently be expected to appear shortly either in very long beards or with lipstick skewed -¬ for I cannot see how they can look themselves in the political mirror again, after this set of performances.
Here follows a broad sample (I cannot claim, without shorthand, that it will be verbatim) of the first week’s exchanges.
Opening address to the jury by second-string News International QC, Mr Clark: ‘The News of the World prides itself on campaigning and on exposing hypocrisy. It will seek to prove that articles written about Tommy Sheridan were substantially true. His Lordship may instruct you at the end that evidence does not have to be true in every detail, but be substantially true.’
The evidence is claimed to fall into 5 chapters.
1. Newspaper articles 2. Evidence of attending Cupids in Manchester
3. Moathouse Hotel party in Glasgow 4. Evidence from certain women
5. The meeting of the SSP Executive on 9th November 2004.
However, in reality, the ‘evidence’ is being presented in a horribly jumbled, jumping-about way, perhaps hoping to convince the jury that there is no smoke without fire. The jury may decide, on the other hand, that there is no smokescreen without a willingness to deceive and confuse them.
Witness 1: Allison Kane, National Treasurer SSP, who has to be taken early because she is flying off to Cuba on holiday… Fidel not being the sort of man you keep waiting. She says that Tommy Sheridan left the EC of 9th November 2004 at about 8, but that the meeting went on till after 10.
Mr Jones (News International’s first-string QC): Was Mr Sheridan aware that minutes were being taken of this meeting?
Allison Kane: Yes.
[By the reaction on Tommy’s bench, it would be obvious to the jury that this is not taken, shall we say, as an enormously truthful answer!]
Richard Keen (Tommy’s QC): Do you regard Graeme McIver/Rosemary Byrne/Jock Penman/Patricia Smith/Professor Michael Gonzales/Steve Arnott/Charlotte Ahmed [each taken as a separate question] as a decent and honourable member of the SSP?
Allison Kane: Yes.
Richard Keen QC: None of these people ever saw a minute of this meeting, not until May 2006 when it was suddenly produced. How do you account for that?
Allison Kane: You’ll have to ask them that.
Richard Keen QC: I’m asking you, whether you have any explanation as to why that is.
Allison Kane: [as though coached in restricting herself to this answer, this time more defiantly/ petulantly] You’ll have to ask them that.
Witness 2: Alan Caldwell, Freelance Journalist, Glasgow.
Claims to have received calls about TS from a contact who is a businessman and an ‘unashamed’ swinger. Evening Times, who sacked him shortly afterwards, refused to touch the story, but N of W carried it on 30th October 2004. Caldwell refuses to name this anonymous source, because it would damage him as a businessman. The total hypocrisy of this position, where Caldwell makes his living by attempting to damage the reputation of others, is shown up by Richard Keen QC, but Lord Turnbull does not insist on the source being named.
Claims that his contact also told him that TS visited a swingers’club called Chambray in Sheffield in February 2006.
Richard Keen QC: Do you think my client is a complete idiot, that while preparing a case for defamation against the News of the World, he would visit a swingers’ club?
Alan Caldwell: It would appear to be unusual.
Witness 3: Ken Adams, Freelance Journalist, Aberdeenshire.
Spent 10 weeks trying to get Fiona McGuire to speak about an affair she alleged she was having with TS. Adams didn’t tell FM that he had already contacted the N of W about this, but Adams felt that he had to tell N of W ‘because it was the right thing to do.’ At one point he helpfully indicated that she would probably get the money for a coveted red Audi TT out of any story she could come up with. At another point she told him that she was a party girl into drink and drugs and couldn’t remember details. ‘I think it was winter, it was cold…’ There had apparently been this assignation in the Treetops Hotel…
Richard Keen QC: So, did you go there to check that out?
Ken Adams: Well…
Richard Keen QC: Did you ever go there?
Ken Adams: I used to go there as a child, to play in the grounds… [laughter]
Richard Keen QC: Did you go and check the hotel register?
Ken Adams: One day, I was on my way home, it was on my road so I just went in past… [laughter, Lord Turnbull threatens to throw public out, though it was the jury who laughed first, and under Scots Law a judge is not empowered to eject a jury for its sense of humour] …but you can’t expect a Reo Stakis hotel to hand over their register like that.
Richard Keen QC: So you have no phone records, receipts, credit card records, video evidence… and you never saw them together? In fact, you didn’t do anything to check her story out?
Ken Adams: I have her word… You trust what they say… £20,000 is a low figure for a story such as that.
Witness 4: Douglas Wight, Scottish News Editor, News of the World.
Fiona McGuire: [Not appearing as yet, if at all, but we see the transcript of a taped interview with DW] I am a party girl who does drugs and stuff - so no matter how many times you ask me, I will never remember dates and stuff.
Richard Keen, Tommy’s QC: [Speaking about Fiona McGuire’s allegations] So you have no physical proof, no hotel reservations, no phone records, photographs, receipts, bills, text messages, knowledge of dates? … What proved it for you then?
Douglas Wight: She seemed trustworthy.
Duncan Rowan: Is this off the record?
Douglas Wight: Yes.
DR: No recording devices?
DW: Not at all.
DR: Do you mind if we go outside?
DW: Not at all.
Lord Turnbull: What is going on here? What are we seeing? Why are we seeing this conversation in transcript?
Douglas Wight: I always keep a tape-recorder in the pocket of my jacket.
Matt McCall: [Not appeared as yet. Taped evidence, after Douglas Wight doorsteps him and jumps in his car. The alleged organizer of and conductor of three female ‘witnesses’ to a party in the Moathouse Hotel, Glasgow, at which TS was allegedly spotted 3-in-a-bed with a prostitute]: I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t even at this party.
Witness 5: Alan McCombes
Alan McCombes stated that he was in court under the strongest possible protest, that he thought the case should have been settled ‘before innocent people were dragged into this bizarre pantomime’, said ‘I am not here to take sides’ that he was there ‘to defend the integrity of the party and of its office-bearers’ and that ‘that’s which side, I’ll take, if any.’ He several times refused to answer questions, but when instructed by Lord Caldwell that he must, he did so.
Thus the strange self-defeating futility of a strategy that involved ‘keeping a record so that we know why Tommy resigned’, advertising the existence of that ‘record’ at an EC in May 2006, refusing to give up that ‘record’ to the courts, going to prison as a brief exercise in martyrdom, involving the party in tens of thousands of pounds of legal expenses for this ‘defiance’, and then, finally, purveying alleged private conversations in open court, is laid bare. And, considering everything Alan has done for the party, and considering I have always regarded him as a friend and comrade, very, very sad.
Witness 6: Keith Baldassara
An astonishing passage occurs on day 5. Mr Jones, QC for News International, seems to have prior knowledge of a social event at which Keith Baldassara claims he heard incriminating stuff about Tommy, which really disturbed him. This has nothing to do with the SSP Executive, or anything ever alleged to have been heard or discussed there. This is new stuff, which Jones, Murdoch’s QC goes fishing for, and which Baldassara makes a hugely-exaggerated show of trying to recall, or pretending not to be willing to talk about, and which he then ‘reveals’. Under examination, it turns out not to be what it seems, and not to involve Tommy in any case. Yet in the media yesterday it was luridly headlined ‘Night of Madness’. Real smear stuff.
Mr Jones, QC: Did you hear any discussion of the stag party for Andy McFarlane?
Keith Baldassara: [Racks brain, looks at ceiling, looks into middle distance, looks at VDU screen – for over half-a-minute]
Mr Jones, QC: Shall I repeat the question, Mr Baldassara?
Keith Baldassara: I’m aware there was an event.
Mr Jones, QC: Were you present?
KB: No, I heard Mr McFarlane bragging about it… a night of madness…there wasn’t enough room in the bed… someone flown in specially from Birmingham… I was concerned about the implications of this… was considering leaving the post of working for TS, because I found it incompatible that TS would participate in this event…
Then it turns out, under examination and cross-examination, that TS did not participate, was not a witness of the ‘madness’, and that the person who flew in did so voluntarily!
Mr Henderson, QC: Can you explain why the leader of the party, Colin Fox, does not seem to have seen the ‘minute’ of the EC meeting of 9th November 2004?
KB: I think Colin will have to explain that.
Mr H: How would the leader of the party not know its worst secret?
KB: [in mantra mode] I think Colin will have to explain that.
Keith Baldassara reveals that there was a meeting before the meeting on 9th November, with a select group planning a strategy. This meeting took place two or three days before the executive committee and was attended by Rosie Kane, Carolyn Leckie, National Secretary Alan Green, Press and Publicity officer Alan McCombes, Trade Union National Organiser Richie Venton, Glasgow Councilor Keith Baldassara and probably Francis Curran. The meeting took place in Alan McCombes flat.
Mr H: Does it not sound like a plot to oust Mr Sheridan?
KB: We had no reason to do that.
Witness 7: Anvar Khan
Mr Henderson: You say in this piece that the ‘married MSP’ got ‘very drunk’. Have you ever seen Mr Sheridan drunk?
Anvar Khan: No.
Mr H: Did you have spanking sessions with him?
AK: No.
Mr H: Did you wear red gloves?
AK No.
Mr H: Did any of these things happen?
AK: No, it’s a puff for a book. [Her book on relationships called Pretty Wild] I didn’t write that. There are parts that are related to reality and parts that are not. The only thing that’s true is what I’m saying today.
Mr H: Are you saying all that’s in the News of the World is not true?
AK: No. But the SSP thought I was writing about him.
Mr H: Certain factions within the SSP wanted it to be about him?
{Evidence from AK continues, Tuesday 11th July]
Interim conclusion
I have heard so many stories these first five days, that as a published novelist, I am thinking of declaring a demarcation dispute! But what has happened so far proves for me beyond doubt that what has been damaging to the SSP is not the scandal concocted by the Murdoch press, nor the defamation case being pursued by Tommy Sheridan in retort.
What has been damaging to the SSP is the elementary political failure by a minority to understand why the Murdoch press would always grasp at fart-thin evidence to attack a strong socialist leader, and a failure to analyse how the party should have responded and should still be responding.
Not as class collaborationists making a show of reluctance in playing an expensive game of hide-and-seek with the courts over some very dubious ‘document’.
Not as a moral majority (moral minority actually!) on some self-appointed high horse, and with their eye on personal power.
But as mature analysts who recognise that we are a hard-headed materialist not a lightweight idealist party, and as such, that we have a huge collective responsibility to avoid any course which damages our ability to fight for the improvement of material conditions for working folk, and towards a revolutionary restructuring of society.
This case is a very tough ordeal for Tommy, Gail, their families and for loyal SSP members. There is no sign that the News of the World’s stories, even by their own abysmal standards, are substantially true.
Tommy has an excellent legal team, who have taken the case on a no cure, no fee basis. I think we will win through.
John Aberdein
