Nicola Sturgeon survives the Alex Salmond affair

IT WAS MARCH 29TH 2018, and in an Edinburgh office building a civil servant’s birthday party was under way. After the cake and singing, Geoff Aberdein asked to speak to Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, alone in her office. What happened next is uncertain, for no one else was in the room.

Mr Aberdein says that during a ten- or 15-minute conversation, he revealed that Alex Salmond—his former boss and Ms Sturgeon’s predecessor—was subject to two complaints by former officials. Ms Sturgeon would later tell the Scottish Parliament she was first told of the claims four days later. She insists Mr Aberdein merely urged her to meet Mr Salmond, who was deeply distressed and threatening to resign from the Scottish National Party. “I had a general sense that it was something serious, something in the realms of a sexual complaint potentially,” she told James Hamilton, Ireland’s former public prosecutor, whom Ms Sturgeon had asked to investigate the claim that she had misled the Scottish Parliament.