Was it meeting the Faroese PM that gave Carmichael the idea to smear Sturgeon?

Alistair Carmichael, MP, while Secretary of State for Scotland, travelled to the Faroe Islands a few weeks before parliament closed to meet the Faroese Prime Minister.

Thanks to Gunnar Holm-Jacobsen, Director of the Faroese Foreign Service, for posting this picture on twitter on the 9th Mar 2015:

Alistair Carmichael, as Secretary of State for Scotland, meets Kaj Leo Holm Johannesen, the Prime Minister of  the Faroe Islands, on 9th Mar 2015 in Tórshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands

The Faroese Government website also notes that during Carmichael's two-day visit, he was to meet with their Minister of Trade & Industry and also with their Minister of Fisheries, amongst others.

As I noted in my An Open Letter to the Constituents of Orkney & Shetland, the Faroe Islands is under Danish control but has a degree of Home Rule, including over some Foreign Affairs. Thus, even though Denmark is a part of the EU, the Faroe Islands chose not to become a member. Thus, the Faroe Islands is a non-EU state.

This is not the first time Carmichael has had a jolly at the taxpayers expense to the Faraoe Islands. Prior to becoming Secretary of State for Scotland, Carmichael was a member of the All-Party Faroe Islands Group and made a number of visits to the islands as noted in the Register of Members' Financial Interests. For example, here is an entry from 6th Sep 2010:

6. Overseas visits
Name of donor: Faroese Government
Address of donor: Representation of the Faroes to London, 55 Sloane St, London SW1X 9SR
Amount of donation (or estimate of the probable value): all costs of the visit, £900
Destination of visit: Faroe Islands
Date of visit: 17-20 August 2009
Purpose of visit: as a member of the All-Party Faroe Islands Group, I travelled to the islands to meet with Faroese parliamentarians and government bodies.
(Registered 16 September 2009)

Note that the visit took place in mid-August but it was almost one month later before he registered the visit. Parliamentary wheels move slowly.

Remember, Carmichael met the Faroese PM on Monday, 9th Mar - that's just three weeks before the UK parliament dissolved for the general election and just 3 weeks and 2 days before the memo was leaked to the Telegraph.

So less than a month after Carmichael's official state visit to the Faroe Islands, he was publicly smearing the First Minister of Scotland. Was it this visit that triggered the idea of leaking the so-called Frenchgate memo?

My reasoning is that senior politicians have to write up memos of the foreign dignitaries they've met. If Carmichael had to write one for his Faroe trip, did he look up Sturgeon's to see how they're normally written?...

Let's look at the dates involved.

Thu, 26th Feb - meeting between Sturgeon and the French ambassador
Thu, 5th Mar - Carmichael meets Mexico's President in Aberdeen
Fri, 6th Mar - memo written in Scotland Office via phone call from Consul General, over one week after Sturgeon met the ambassador
Sat 7th Mar - 2015 Northern Isles Digital Forum in Kirkwall, chaired by Carmichael
Mon 9th Mar - Carmichael's two-day state visit to the Faroe Islands
Thu 12th Mar - Ibrahim Taguri/Danny Alexander cheat-funding-rules allegation

If Alistair Carmichael normally works from the London office but was in Aberdeen on Thu (the day before the memo was written) and then was chairing the Northern Isles Digital Forum in Orkney, which began at 11.30 am on Sat (the day after the memo was written), it is possible he did not go to his London office on Friday at all and thus was not present when the memo got written.

After the Digital Forum on the Sat, he probably relaxed on the Sun before heading to the Faroe Islands for his two-day state visit. He perhaps returned to work in the London office on the Wed - almost a week after the memo was written. More than likely, he spent that first day back just catching up with what had been going on in government while he'd been away for so long.

Danny Alexander shows his gratitude to the Telegraph's fake donor.

The next day, the Telegraph ran with a story that their undercover reporter posed as a donor to the Lib Dems and was told by Ibrahim Taguri how to secretly donate money to them via a third party, which is illegal. Danny Alexander was also implicated and it was a huge story. It is likely that Carmichael was not focussed on his Scotland Office duties but kept rather busy trying to figure out how to minimise the damage to the Lib Dems.

Given the proximity to the dissolution of Parliament, the looming election campaign, the fake donor funding smear, state visits to the Faroe Islands and chairing a Digital Forum meeting in his constituency, looking at a memo of a meeting Sturgeon had with the French Ambassador is probably the last thing on his mind.

One can imagine Alistair Carmichael eventually being quizzed by the civil servants over how the meeting with the Faroese Government went. He'd have then discovered that such briefings are formally recorded and distributed. But he's busy and doesn't like doing paperwork. The civil servants push him. They tell him that Parliament is due to be dissolved soon and that he must write up the account of his Faroese trip.

But he's not sure just how much detail he's expected to give. He decides to look through previous briefings to get a feel for how they are written and how detailed they normally are. It is by doing this that he discovers the memo detailing Nicola Sturgeons meeting with the French ambassador. Then he gets the idea of leaking it.

This is speculation on my part but it is hard to ignore the coincidence of the time scales involved. We know from his previous visits to the Faroe Islands that it normally takes him around a month to register them. Like many of us, he doesn't like doing paperwork. He follows the same pattern this time with the added pressure from the looming dissolution of Parliament. But there is a big difference - he is the Secretary of State for Scotland now and the state wants a formal memo written. Parliament is closing and he feels rushed. If he can just copy a previous one, it'll make it easier to do. He remembers that Nicola Sturgeon met the French ambassador - he knows because he's in the Scotland Office and that's the type of thing he's meant to know. One of his staff even wrote a memo about it. So one can imagine he calls up that memo as an example to follow when he writes up his own.

But in it is a bombshell revelation he wasn't expecting - Sturgeon may have said to the French ambassador that she'd prefer Cameron to Miliband but the memo's author thinks it unlikely and that something was "lost in translation."

Carmichael doesn't care.

Instead of asking the civil servant who wrote the memo to call the French consul general and clear up the confusion so that the state has an accurate record of the meeting, he seizes upon it as a possible way to bring the SNP surge to a sudden halt. From his own admission during the general election campaign, "these things happen." So he probably thought he'd get away with it during the campaign because everyone was attacking the SNP with either lies or misrepresentation. Just the week before, on the 22nd Mar, the Tories had released an animated video showing Ed Miliband dancing to Alex Salmond's tune.

A recorder-playing Alex Salmond forces Ed Miliband to dance to his tune.

Carmichael must have thought that if the Tories could do something like that, then what was the harm of him joining in the fun? And so he did...

Was it really Alistair Carmichael's idea all along? Did he order Euan Roddin to then go and speak to the Telegraph?

I think Alistair Carmichael has serious questions to answer. Was he in the office the day the memo was written? Did he write a memo of his Faroese trip and if so, when? Was it only once the campaign started that he thought he could then lie and cheat without impunity? Does the Faroese Government now feel that they were probably lied to by Carmichael during his state visit, given that he lied shortly after that visit in order to smear the First Minister of Scotland? Is the Faroese memo accurate? Should that now be released to the public? And if Carmichael knew the contents of the Frenchgate memo and knew that it contained doubts over its own accuracy, why didn't he order the matter to be investigated further and the memo rewritten?

It is time Alistair Carmichael properly explained himself to the public and to set out the real timetable of events that led to him discovering the contents of this memo.