Former Scottish secretary Alistair Carmichael was behind the leaking of an official memo which claimed that Nicola Sturgeon would prefer David Cameron to stay on as prime minister, a government inquiry has concluded.
According to the document – leaked to the Telegraph during the election campaign – the Scottish first minister described Ed Miliband as “not prime minister material” in a conversation with a French ambassador. Sturgeon described the account of the conversation as "100% false", prompting cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood to launch an inquiry into the source of the leak.
The findings of the inquiry – published by the Cabinet Office this afternoon – clear the civil servant in the Scotland Office who drafted the memo, with senior officials telling the inquiry team that he had "no history of inaccurate reporting, impropriety or security lapses". The civil servant told the inquiry team he believed the account of the conversation between Sturgeon and the French Ambassador was accurate, but pointed to the memo's inclusion of a caveat that some of its meaning may have been "lost in translation".
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Instead, the inquiry finds that Carmichael's then-special adviser Euan Roddin provided a copy of the memo to the Daily Telegraph on April 1, and "discussed the memo with a journalist on a number of occasions".
Carmichael – who is the sole remaining Scottish Liberal Democrat MP – told the inquiry that he gave Roddin permission for the memo to be leaked to the paper. The report says he has accepted that he "could and should have stopped the sharing of the memo", adding that neither Carmichael or Roddin will take severance pay – usually equal to three months' salary for ministers.
At the time of the controversy over the leaking of the memo, Carmichael told Channel 4 News that the Cabinet Office inquiry centred not on "somebody in public life", but "a civil servant".
Dave Penman – general secretary of the FDA union which represents senior civil servants – said the findings of the cabinet secretary's probe would "come as no surprise to many".
"The actions of politicians in leaking documents or pointing accusatory fingers at Whitehall, as happened in this case, can cast doubt on the honesty, integrity and impartiality that are the bedrock of the civil service. Once again any such doubt has proved to be unfounded but not before the reputations and careers of civil servants have been brought into question.
"Politicians are more than aware that civil servants may become collateral damage when they choose to leak documents. The consequences for a civil servant leaking information could have been catastrophic, but it would appear that different rules apply when it comes to politicians."
The impartiality of the civil service has been the subject of much mud-slinging between Holyrood and Westminster in recent months. The row over the Scotland Office leak came just weeks after Sturgeon launched an attack on Whitehall's integrity, accusing HM Treasury of acting in a "transparently party political” manner by subjecting SNP spending plans to an opposition costing exercise.
MPs on the public administration committee meanwhile concluded that it had been wrong for HMT to publish a letter by permanent secretary Nicholas Macpherson on the impact of a currency union in the run-up to the vote on Scottish independence, while also slamming the Scottish government for its use of official resources in drawing up its "party political" independence White Paper.