Daily archives: April 4, 2015


Stunning New Leaked Document

A gentleman in a dark trenchcoat has just handed me this minute. I am not going to check the veracity of its contents at all, but I am rather going immediately to publish it.

Mr Carlton-Browne,

I had a phone call from that Peruvian Johnny. No idea what he was saying, some kind of foreigner talk apparently. Anyway it turned out that young Olga the cleaner could speak the language so she translated for me. She is a marvel, Olga. She even takes copies home of everything for me so that if I lose something she’ll have another copy safe and sound.

Anyway, apparently this Peruvian chap had been in Scotland and met up with Alex Salmond, who used to be some sort of local official. He thought that I would like to know that Salmond said he wasn’t big on canapes and despite his name didn’t like smoked salmon. Rather wry that, I thought.

He went on to say that Salmond said he had enormous respect for Nigel Farage, who was very macho, and he would be delighted to see a UKIP government in power after the general election, preferably in coalition with Pegida. Salmond added “thank God nobody knows about this, or they would lynch me. Of course I haven’t told anybody, but I feel perfectly safe revealing it at random to a passing Peruvian I just met.”

The Peruvian chap said before he hung off that of course he was telling me as everybody knows that all foreign ambassadors must by protocol give details of all their transactions to their host governments and that anybody who denied this was a dirty liar, particularly smart-arsed ex-diplomats from Edinburgh. He also added clearly that nobody at all should believe him if he himself denied these conversations had ever taken place.

I thanked him very much for this information. This is a very proper and official government memo, oh yes. It even has acronyms – we shall have to tell R2D2 and SPECTRE before the meeting in Rio about climate change because we are all genuine government people doing important government business, oh yes.

I shan’t put my name on this as it is all jolly secret. If anyone catches us out, just say Olga got lost in translation.

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#Frenchgate: Definitely the Security Services

The Foreign Office has denied the existence of any such memo as that allegedly leaked to the Daily Telegraph, which has now published the full text. Reading it, I can say for sure it is not an FCO memo. That has led some to assume this means it is a Scottish Office memo. But there is a problem here.

Firstly, if the Scottish Office – or any other government department – made a record of a conversation with the French Consul-General, they would undoubtedly have copied it to the FCO. Particularly as the FCO is mentioned and a number of overseas visits and an international negotiation are discussed. If this were a genuine minute, the FCO would undoubtedly have a copy. If the FCO denies it exists, that means there was no such memo made in the Scottish Office and distributed in the ordinary channels.

Secondly, as I stated, the media’s claim that it was a protocol requirement for the French Embassy to report such conversations to the FCO was a complete fabrication. Not only is there no such requirement, it would be contrary to normal diplomatic practice. That is even more true with the Scottish Office. It is unthinkable that the French Consul-General would report those kind of confidential comments from Nicola Sturgeon to the Scottish Office.

If Embassies reported everything people told them to their host governments, nobody would tell the embassy anything. Indeed this episode has already damaged the French Embassy, because it casts a slur upon the discretion and confidentiality which is essential to operate as a diplomat. It may well be that driving a wedge between the SNP and the French Embassy was part of what the security services sought to achieve.

It damages the French Embassy, it damages the SNP, and it damages Miliband by repeating the meme about his being weak and unfit. Those would all seem good results to the security services. Only Miliband has been stupid enough to go along with it.

It seems to me the overwhelming probability is that this document, whether it purports to be a FCO or Scottish Office document, was originated by the Security Services, possibly with the active collusion of someone in the Scottish Office, or equally possibly without their knowledge. Whatever it purported to be, it never entered the normal civil service distribution systems, as the FCO would have a copy, and it would have raised alarm bells all over the place as seriously weird and improbable. It is in that sense a fake, even if it were physically produced inside the Scottish Office. Its purpose was to be leaked to the media and influence the election.

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UK Intelligence Services Attack SNP

The fake FCO memo has MI5 written all over it. This is the worst example of British security services influencing an election campaign since the Zinoviev letter.

For those whose history is a bit shaky:

The Zinoviev letter – one of the greatest British political scandals of this century – was forged by a MI6 agent’s source and almost certainly leaked by MI6 or MI5 officers to the Conservative Party, according to an official report published today.[4 Feb 1999]
New light on the scandal which triggered the fall of the first Labour government in 1924 is shed in a study by Gill Bennett, chief historian at the Foreign Office, commissioned by Robin Cook

Ever since Treasury Permanent Secretary Nicholas MacPherson stated that civil service impartiality rules do not apply in the case of Scottish independence, I have been warning the SNP that we are going to be the target of active subversion by the UK and US security services. We are seen as a danger to the British state and thus a legitimate target. I spelled this out in my talk to the Edinburgh SNP Club on 6 March, of which more below.

The FCO “memo” reporting that Nicola Sturgeon would rather have a Tory government, is a remarkable document. Firstly, its provenance is very strange. It has been leaked ostensibly by the FCO to the Telegraph. According to the Guardian:

“The leaked document was drafted by a Whitehall official after Coffinier called the FCO, as protocol requires, to pass on a confidential account of several of the ambassador’s meetings in Edinburgh, which included a meeting with Alistair Carmichael, the Scottish secretary.”

The extraordinary thing is, this is just a lie. As someone who worked in the FCO for over twenty years and was an Ambassador myself, I can assure you there is absolutely no protocol requirement on the French Ambassador to give the FCO the content of the meetings she, her Consul-General or anybody else from the French Embassy held in Edinburgh. That claim is absolute nonsense.

Look at it from the Embassy’s point of view. If you repeated everything Nicola Sturgeon told you to the FCO, do you not think she would shortly stop telling you anything at all interesting? That is why diplomats absolutely do not retail such conversations to their host governments.

The second quite extraordinary thing is that both sides of the alleged conversation categorically deny it was said. Nicola Sturgeon denies she said it and the French Embassy deny she said it. So we have a leaked account of a conversation which all the participants say is untrue, yet the unionist media all feel this evidently untrue account is worth splashing as their lead story? The collusion of security services and corporate media is terrifying.

Timing is all. I was wondering how the security services would react to the seemingly unstoppable SNP momentum, following Nicola Sturgeon’s brilliant performance in the leaders’ debate. When I gave that talk to the SNP club, I warned that, as the main threat to the British state, we would suffer the full panoply of dirty tricks from MI5 and CIA. This would include increased penetration, communication interception, agent provocateur activities, forgeries and eventually might include false flag violence blamed on nationalists.

We are at a crisis in our constitutional history. I believe the momentum towards a Scottish exit from the UK is unstoppable. The British state is seeking to appear on the surface to agree to give Scots a free and democratic choice, while using every dirty trick to subvert that choice. Those tricks range from complete control of state and corporate media to the darker arts of the security services.

As I also stated to the SNP club, the USA has decided it is in their interest for the Unionists to prevail, not least so Scotland remains a base for the American controlled Trident missiles the UK taxpayer so obligingly funds. A large part of the CIA’s existence has been and is dedicated to covert activity to keep the forms of government it wants in power in the world. It does not want the SNP.

That the attempt to destabilise Nicola Sturgeon originates with the UK government and the Telegraph should give everyone pause. It is very obviously a security service effort. How otherwise is an account which the French Embassy says is completely false, contained in an official memo to be leaked?

This episode raises very serious questions. But they are not questions about Nicola Sturgeon. They are questions about the subversion of democracy by the security services, and the willing complicity of the corporate media.

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