Part of the debate – in the Scottish Parliament at on 25 January 2018.
With the greatest of respect, it shows no such thing. Andrew Flanagan, the former chair of the SPA, said at the committee this morning that he had not been requested by the justice secretary to change his decision. He had no option—in his view—but to change his decision, because he could not answer the most basic questions about the process that had been followed.
Again, we come back to the nub of the issue. Ruth Davidson has changed ground with every question that she has asked today, but the nub of the issue is this. If she is saying that the justice secretary should not have asked those questions and acted in the way that he did, by definition she must be saying that the chief constable should simply have been allowed to return to work, no matter that none of those basic steps had been followed.
Ruth Davidson keeps saying that, last week, I said nine times that I thought the justice secretary had behaved entirely appropriately. I have said it several times again today, so let me say it one more time: the justice secretary acted entirely appropriately, he acted in the interests of the people of Scotland and, faced with the same circumstances again, he would do the same and ask the same legitimate questions all over again.
