Row over Sturgeon leak likely to help SNP

The bitter row about the leaking of an official memorandum which claimed that Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon had told French diplomats that she favoured David Cameron's re-election is expected to boost the SNP's campaign.

The memo, drafted by a Scottish Office official, claimed that Sturgeon had made the remark at a private meeting with the French ambassador to the United Kingdom, Sylvie Bermann.

However, the memo, leaked to the Daily Telegraph, includes a warning from the official, who had been briefed by the French consul-general to Edinburgh, Pierre-Alain Coiffiner, that Sturgeon would have been unlikely to have been so blunt.

Mr Coiffiner and Ms Bermann immediately denied that the story, published late on Friday night, was true, as did the Scottish First Minister, who said she had never been contacted about it by the newspaper.

The Labour Party, which seized upon the story, has been damaged by the affair, which is seen in Scotland even by non-SNP voters as being evidence of a Whitehall “dirty tricks” conspiracy.

Conspiracy

However, the level of conspiracy is probably far more limited, leading to speculation that a single individual in the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats saw value in disclosing the information.

The memo itself, which does not appear as an attempt to deliberately misrepresent the conversation with Coiffiner, seems more likely to have been the result of a misunderstanding.

A Conservative victory, if it were to happen, would be useful to the SNP, since it could be expected to heighten demands for a second independence referendum – particularly against the backdrop of an EU membership referendum.

However, a minority Labour government, kept alive by conditional SNP support on a vote-by-vote basis, would allow the SNP to wield unprecendented power in Westminster. Either way, the SNP wins.

The memo controversy has prompted an immediate inquiry by the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, who is understood to be incandescent.

Labour, which launches its campaign in Scotland officially today, is desperate to hold on to as many of its 41 outgoing Scottish Westminster seats as possible in the face of a strong SNP challenge.

However, Sturgeon, who performed strongly in last week's TV debate, has put further pressure on the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, to join a pre-election pact to keep the Conservatives out of power.

Meanwhile, Leanne Wood, the leader of Plaid Cymru in Wales, which is bidding to hold on to its three Westminster places, said MPs from her party would try to put pressure on Labour to shift left.

“Yes. I think that many people who vote Labour do so because of what Labour used to stand for, in terms of their old values. And if we, with others ... can put pressure to bear on the Labour party to force them to consider what their original values were all about, then I think that’s something that would have backing from people,” she said.

The Conservatives’ strategy in recent weeks has been to demonise the SNP, believing that wavering opinion in English battleground constituencies could be persuaded to abandon Labour for them if they were faced with excessive Scottish influence.