http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/S...id-Cameron.html

 

Taking this with a pinch of salt, but a lot have been wondering...

Both the SNP and the French have categorically denied this.

 

When a paper has time to approach someone as irrelevant as the head of the Scottish Lib Dems for comment but not the First Minister or the French Ambassador you know it's utter bullshit.

 

What's hilarious is how badly Labour fell for it and then how hastily and sharply they performed that u turn.

As others said, until the French came out and denied everything it seemed pretty legit - especially given the Torygraph have been falling over themselves to big up Sturgeon recently. The Labour press team had made a campaign video out of Ed's one minute debate speech within an hour of it being aired. A quick three sentence response while out on the campaign trail does not constitute "falling for it" in 2015.

All the campaign offices for my area are located in Cupar and quite tellingly I haven't seen a Labour one. The Tories, bless their hearts, are back again. The SNP has got a prime local and the LibDems have had an office here for as long as I've lived here.

 

Even UKIP have steered clear!

I like that the French Civil Service denying that they're responsible for a potential diplomatic incident is seen as proof it didn't happen. I find McBride's take on it food for thought:

 

After 15 hours of fascinating and – let’s face it – fairly exciting developments in l’affaire Sturgeon, here’s where I think we are, and I’ll try to stick as much as possible to incontrovertible facts, not political bluster:

 

If this was all a grand misunderstanding, I think the various parties would have come together by now to explain what they think has happened, e.g. perhaps Nicola Sturgeon used the word ‘expect’, that got turned into ‘espoir’ back in the French embassy, and then relayed to the FCO as ‘hope’. That’s pretty plausible, but we’ve heard no such explanation yet.

 

If it’s not a genuine misunderstanding, we’re left with the uncomfortable conclusion that one or more parties may have got their version of events wrong. And to my mind, there are three options in that regard:

 

(i) Perhaps the senior FCO official who spoke to the Consul General has misheard or chosen to embellish what the Consul General said. From my experience, this is borderline impossible. The stock in trade of FCO officials is producing memos like this: a verbatim record of conversations they’ve had, with a minor bit of commentary in the margins. This is a classic of its kind. I think we can state with some degree of certainty that what the FCO official wrote down is exactly what the Consul General said to him/her;

 

(ii) So perhaps the Consul General has misheard or chosen to embellish what Nicola Sturgeon said to the Ambassador. Mr Coffinier has been working as a civil servant in the French foreign affairs department for almost 30 years. In interviews, he comes across as dry and conscientious. Just look at the rest of the memo: his careful discussion of sensitivities around a meeting with a French minister; his concern over being able to provide a speaker for the Edinburgh Science Festival. Is this the sort of man to get something like the Sturgeon-Ambassador exchange wrong, or embellish it? Absolument pas;

 

(iii) This takes us to Sturgeon and the Ambassador themselves. We cannot know what was said between them, but they have both denied that Sturgeon ‘expressed a preference’ over the identity of the next PM. And to back them up, the Consul General says there is nothing in his notes of the meeting indicating the expression of a preference, “which suggests neither Nicola nor my ambassador said anything.”

 

So we have a mystery: if the denials of Sturgeon, the Ambassador and the Consul General are to be believed, we must wonder how the nature and detail of their conversation was so radically altered by the time the FCO official wrote it down, based on the account of the Consul General. Mr Coffinier himself has so far offered no explanation for this point.

 

Of course, there have been countless conversations in political history where the parties who took part come away with a different view of what was said (Oh, Granita!). That is not because one party is lying: it is just because people remember what they want to remember, depending what suits their interests.

In this instance, both parties are agreeing that was said is not what has elsewhere been written down. That may be true, but it should also be noted that it suits both parties to remember the conversation in this way: both Sturgeon and the French embassy would like the highly embarrassing version of events contained in the FCO memo to be discredited as soon as possible.

 

So that is where we currently are, and unless more information comes to light, that is where we will probably stay. But in the interests of unraveling this mystery, here are two questions it might be useful to answer:

 

1. Was the Consul General present for the Sturgeon-Ambassador meeting? I’m not clear on this point, but it would be useful to establish whether whatever account he gave to the FCO of the conversation was a first-hand account from a direct witness to the exchange, or a “third-hand account” as Nicola Sturgeon’s spokeswoman has claimed?; and

 

2. Are Sturgeon, the Ambassador and the Consul General disputing the entire version of the conversation reported in the FCO memo, or just the line about the First Minister’s supposed preference for David Cameron as PM. Did she say, for example, that “she wouldn’t want a formal coalition with Labour”; that “the SNP would almost certainly have a large number of seats”; that “she had no idea ‘what kind of mischief’ Alex Salmond would get up to”; and that she “didn’t see Ed Miliband as PM material”. If those four points are accurate, then it makes it all the more remarkable that the fifth point (about the preference for Cameron) was not. If, on the other hand, all five points are disputed, then it raises even more serious questions about how this account of events found its way into the official FCO memo.

 

Perhaps if we can get the answers to those two questions, we can get closer to solving this puzzle. Or perhaps all sides will finally get together and work out what has caused this giant diplomatic misunderstanding.

She probably just said "Ed isn't prime minister material", and her supposedly preferring Cameron was just this diplomat's conjecture. Remember even if the memo is accurate (as in, hasn't been doctored), it's only a second-hand account based on what someone had heard from someone else.

Edited April 4, 201510 yr by Danny

The wording of the memo did say 'and confessed that she’d rather see David Cameron remain as PM (and didn’t see Ed Miliband as PM material)', which seems like a bit of a stretch from that given the Ambassador is fluent in English and it's the job of these officials to write down these verbatim conversations...

 

I seriously doubt it would be doctored. That's the kind of thing that could totally sink the Telegraph if it were found to be false - the fact there's an internal investigation into the leak in the Civil Service implies it's real, otherwise they would just deny its existence.

The SNP has to be in it for the well-being of the whole of the UK, and needs to be seen to be supporting that view. Any suspicions that they'd willingly endorse or hoist another era of Thatcherism on everyone, INCLUDING Scotland, just to try and grab another quick referendum and push independence would be seen for what it is. Just as it was last time they did it and they declined for the next 30 years. I expect her to whole-heartedly deny they want Cameron to win....

The FCO has reportedly denied the existence of such a memo...

The wording of the memo did say 'and confessed that she’d rather see David Cameron remain as PM (and didn’t see Ed Miliband as PM material)', which seems like a bit of a stretch from that given the Ambassador is fluent in English and it's the job of these officials to write down these verbatim conversations...

 

I seriously doubt it would be doctored. That's the kind of thing that could totally sink the Telegraph if it were found to be false - the fact there's an internal investigation into the leak in the Civil Service implies it's real, otherwise they would just deny its existence.

The Daily Mail is still here, ninety years after the Zinoviev letter :(

The FCO has reportedly denied the existence of such a memo...

Has it?

 

Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood said a leak inquiry had been set up.

 

In a letter to Ms Sturgeon he said: "You have asked me to investigate issues relating to the apparent leak of a Scotland Office memo that forms the basis of this morning's Daily Telegraph story.

 

"I can confirm that earlier today I instigated a Cabinet Office-led leak inquiry to establish how extracts from this document may have got into the public domain."

 

That doesn't sound like the response of an organisation that presumably would've made its first task establishing whether or not the document even existed. The content of the rest of the transcript sounds pretty legitimate for the sheer banality of it all - it'd be a remarkable fake if it didn't at all exist.

That's the kind of thing that could totally sink the Telegraph if it were found to be false

 

The Telegraph is already sunk. Following the recent revelations in Private Eye about the Barclay Brothers and the recent resignation of Peter Oborne the paper has very quickly lost any respect it once had.

By sink, I mean News of the World style.

Farage struggling a bit in his South Thanet seat:

 

Conservatives 31%

UKIP 30%

Labour 29%

 

(ComRes)

Has it?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32177315

 

Usually tend to trust the BBC when they say "A Foreign Office spokeswoman said they had no record of the memo."

 

The quote I posted's from the same article...I presume if it were verified that it didn't exist then they wouldn't be bothering with an inquiry, and it would be the main line the Civil Service were going with. We'll know soon enough anyway.

Farage struggling a bit in his South Thanet seat:

 

Conservatives 31%

UKIP 30%

Labour 29%

 

(ComRes)

Did not expect us to be back in it like this. Would be a massive coup.

Did not expect us to be back in it like this. Would be a massive coup.

It would be hilarious if Farage loses to Labour :lol:

We're at the worrying point where it's very conceivable that we could defeat the leaders of both UKIP and the Lib Dems and still lose the election.

 

I'm too busy biting my nails and cursing to say it enough, but fucking hell I love politics at the moment *.*

We're at the worrying point where it's very conceivable that we could defeat the leaders of both UKIP and the Lib Dems and still lose the election.

 

I'm too busy biting my nails and cursing to say it enough, but fucking hell I love politics at the moment *.*

It's a bit of a cliche to say that a general election is a set of 650 elections. That cliche is probably truer of this election than any other for a very long time. There are still hundreds of seats whose result is a foregone conclusion, but there will be a lot of interesting result on the night. I'm actually rather pleased that I am no longer involved. That means I can watch the results unfold rather than being at a count.

I love what he's done but I actually feel like we've lost a little something because of Ashcroft's polling. Just imagine going into results night not knowing what we already know so far...