[Marxism] Tommy Sheridan and his critics [was: New Scottish Socialist Formation]

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Socialist Resistance statement recommended to this list says, "Eighteen
months later, in response to defamation charges filed by Sheridan, the NoTW
defended the articles as 'substantially true'. They cited five women
witnesses who claimed to have either had affairs with Sheridan, or had seen
him at Cupids or having group sex in the Moat House hotel in Glasgow. The
evidence of two of these as witnesses was tainted in that they had sold
their stories to the NoTW. This is sordid journalism typical of the NoTW but
not proof that they were telling lies."

However, the fact that they were *bribed* to say what they said is hardly
proof that they were telling the truth. And it is precisely this, proof that
they were telling the truth, that was wanted but not proffered. It is very
unfortunate that Socialist Resistance did not present a detailed examination
of the actual evidence and testimony in court, for it paints a very
different picture than that which is being presented by Sheridan's critics,
among them that publication.

The amounts involved --thousands of British pounds-- is strong motivation
for someone to lie. Moreover, other news reports indicate that three of the
women were offered money by News of the World, and a fourth was directly in
the pay of the Murdoch empire as a News of the World columnist. That's four
out of five who were paid by News of the World. Moreover, the fifth woman
was not involved at all as a source of those articles, though she was named
in them.

And, as we shall see, in relation to the two key women witnesses, who were
the main sources for stories about Sheridan, they themselves admitted *under
oath* that various defamatory things said about Sheridan in those stories
were false, fabricated.

Faced with a lawsuit for libel, the News of the World was unable to come up
with any *documentary* evidence or a string of additional corroborating
witnesses to the specific instances of alleged sexual and other misdeeds of
Tommy Sheridan that the paper printed. This is quite astonishing, as
Sheridan is a public figure in the UK and might well have been recognized by
various people at a "swinger's club" had he actually visited such a place,
and the News of the World was willing to pay --handsomely-- for anyone who
came forward. In the case of his alleged trysts in Glasgow hotels, he is, by
all accounts, a top local celebrity and would certainly have been recognized
by hotel staff and guests.

Again, if nothing else, he would have been recognized, certainly by the
Glasgow hotel personnel and possibly by the "swingers club" staff during his
(alleged, lest we forget, though it seems witless to keep saying it)
repeated escapades. Moreover, these additional witnesses would not have
needed to say anything more than that they saw Mr. Sheridan entering the
Hotel, or at such and such a parking lot, or entering the "swingers club,"
without any claim of having observed his private activities. Something like
that would have been tremendously helpful to the News of the World case, and
its absence, coupled with the absence of any paper trail for any of the
escapades that were in the newspaper, is astonishing. 

I say astonishing because I have to assume that the lawyers for NotW or
their hirelings went out and interviewed everyone they could find working at
those establishments as well as people known to frequent the "swinger's
club." They seem to have come up with very little. 

Additional witnesses and documentary evidence was absolutely necessary,
because the most important witnesses against Sheridan admitted in court that
they had lied about their relations with him in what was said in the
articles. 

First, News of the World sex columnist Anvar Khan. She was the source of the
first article which did not name Tommy Sheridan, but was generally believed
to be about him, even though the target was identified only as a "married
MSP" (member of the Scottish Parliament). 

Khan is quoted on a British web site as describing herself this way: "As a
self-confessed media whore, I am on call 24/7 to give my views on anything
from why men cheat to why women stop having sex with their husbands. If I
don?t have an opinion I?ll find one.

"The very tempting offer of an extra hundred quid or so and a few minutes in
front of a camera are enough for me to put away my hoover and abandon more
heavyweight projects, like my latest lover."

Now for her testimony, as reported by Stephen George in the SSP Majority
blog:

"Mr Henderson: You say in this piece that the ?married MSP? got ?very
drunk?. Have you ever seen Mr Sheridan drunk?

"Anvar Khan: No.

"Mr H: Did you have spanking sessions with him?

"AK: No.

"Mr H: Did you wear red gloves?

"AK No.

"Mr H: Did any of these things happen?

"AK: No, it?s a puff for a book. [Her book on relationships called Pretty
Wild] I didn?t write that. There are parts that are related to reality and
parts that are not. The only thing that?s true is what I?m saying today.

"Mr H: Are you saying all that?s in the News of the World is not true?

"AK: No. But the SSP thought I was writing about him."

BTW, Stephen George, the person who posted the detailed account of the
trial, explains in his introduction to these and other exchanges, "I cannot
claim, without shorthand, that it will be verbatim," but other accounts of
the trial essentially confirm the main points of George's reporting, as well
as many of the details he provides, and I've not found any contradictions or
inconsistencies in the details of what was actually testified to between his
and other accounts.

For those who might want to verify this for themselves, a couple of
summaries of the trial might be useful: 

"The evidence ? and how it unravelled," from the Sunday Herald, Aug. 6, 2006
http://www.sundayherald.com/57117

"The woman of steel who saved her man from shame," from the Daily Mail,
August 5, 2005
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/newscomment.html?in_page
_id=1787&in_article_id=399174

The Daily Mail article you have to read halfway or more through before you
get to the meat of the story, which basically goes through and explains why
each of the main witnesses against Sheridan was not credible.

And Stephen George's blog is here: 
http://sspmajority.typepad.com/sspmajority/court_reports/index.html

As to the substance of what Khan said, it is hard to imagine a more damaging
admission at a libel trial than a staff member of the publication being
sued, who is also the source of the first story that the lawsuit is about,
admitting that they consciously made up and printed defamatory things about
the person suing them, things which they knew to be fabrications for they
were fabricating them, as a "puff" for a book. 

Especially if it is coupled with admissions by others working for the paper
that no effort is made to verify what the paper is told, at least not if it
defames Tommy Sheridan. Khan also said, by the way, that she feared for her
job if she hadn't testified at the trial -- hardly a way to convince a jury
that the anti-Sheridan details she did swear to were "nothing but the
truth." For if merely keeping silent was grounds for her to fear for her
job, what would happen to her if she testified that the story was completely
fabricated, not merely partly fabricated?

Ken Adams, a freelancer for News of the World, testified that Fiona McGuire,
the main source for the subsequent pieces that did name Sheridan, had led
Adams to believe that there had been an assignation in the Treetops Hotel.

"Richard Keen QC: So, did you go there to check that out?

"Ken Adams: Well?

"Richard Keen QC: Did you ever go there?

"Ken Adams: I used to go there as a child, to play in the grounds?
[laughter]

"Richard Keen QC: Did you go and check the hotel register?

"Ken Adams: One day, I was on my way home, it was on my road so I just went
in past? [laughter, Lord 
Turnbull threatens to throw public out, though it was the jury who laughed
first, and under Scots Law a judge is not empowered to eject a jury for its
sense of humour] ?but you can?t expect a Reo Stakis hotel to hand over their
register like that.

"Richard Keen QC: So you have no phone records, receipts, credit card
records, video evidence? and you never saw them together? In fact, you
didn?t do anything to check her story out?

"Ken Adams: I have her word? You trust what they say ... £20,000 is a low
figure for a story such as that."

In her testimony Fiona McGuire admitted she received the £20,000 payment
(about $38,000 U.S. dollars). She claimed --but presented no supporting
evidence-- that she had given away £17,000, so that money was not her
motive. This from a woman whose financial circumstances had forced her at
that time into working as a prostitute. She also admitted that she --and not
a friend, as News of the World had falsely reported originally-- was the
source of the story. 

Significantly, she said it was she who had booked the room at the Treetop
Hotel for her first session with Sheridan, making it even curioser that the
News of the World stringer or editors didn't at least ask her whether credit
card or other records might be available, either under her own or her
working name as an escort.

She also told a tortured tale of how having first just mentioned the alleged
affair to a reporter, then she was hounded by Murdoch's minions for her to
give them the story, threatening her that they were going to go with it
anyways, but that she would be made to look much worse if she refused to
cooperate, while she stood to make thousands of pounds if she did cooperate.
McGuire said she took this to mean that she would be exposed as a prostitute
and drug user. 

McGuire testified that she had been put up at a Hotel for three previous
weeks by News of the World and that the paper was also paying for flying
lessons for her. A BBC report quotes the following from her testimony:

"I have been a nervous bloody wreck these past three weeks. 

"I have seen two different doctors. 

"I have a psychiatrist involved because I tried to commit suicide again. 

"I was with Douglas Wight and I shoved a heap of pills into my mouth and he
grabbed me and had to make me sick."

Douglas Wight was the Scottish News Editor for News of the World when the
McGuire story ran in mid-November, 2004. After promising Fiona McGuire that
her conversations with him were not being taped, he nevertheless taped her
and presented transcripts in court. 

This is from Stephen George's account:

"Fiona McGuire: [Not appearing as yet, if at all, but we see the transcript
of a taped interview with DW] I am a party girl who does drugs and stuff -
so no matter how many times you ask me, I will never remember dates and
stuff.

"Richard Keen, Tommy?s QC: [Speaking about Fiona McGuire?s allegations] So
you have no physical proof, no hotel reservations, no phone records,
photographs, receipts, bills, text messages, knowledge of dates? ? What
proved it for you then?

"Douglas Wight: She seemed trustworthy." 

Her inability to remember "dates and stuff" has a convenient side for NotW:
it makes it impossible for Sheridan to show he was somewhere else.

Fiona McGuire is reported by Stephen George to have further testified as
follows:

"Questioned by Graeme Henderson, for Mr Sheridan, Ms McGuire admitted not
everything she had said about the affair was true, and conceded some details
published in the newspaper had probably been inserted to 'raunch it up a
little', but she denied inventing an affair.

"In particular she was shown the paragraph in the News of the World?s
article which reads: ?Another time, during a branch meeting in her house, he
tried to take her clothes off on the stairs while activists sat in the next
room.'

"Graeme Henderson, QC: Did this happen?

"Fiona McGuire: No

"GH: Why did this go in the newspaper?

"FM: To raunch it up a bit.

"GH: Is that what you did with the story about the Treetops Hotel?

"FM: No, do you mean you?re trying to say I was trying to raunch it up a bit
yesterday?

"GH: Yes

"FM: That?s nonsense. If I wanted to raunch it up a bit, I?d have made a far
better job?

The reference to "raunching it up" deserves an explanation. The evidence
showed that McGuire's first version of how her alleged affair with Sheridan
had started was as an intimate one-one-one strawberries and champagne
seduction. 

As the Daily Mail put it, "By the time she came to court, instead of an
intimate twosome, the encounter had grown several pairs of legs and evolved
into a sordid five-in-a-bed romp involving champagne and even cocaine....

"These encounters were immortalised in the News of the World on November 14,
2004, under the headline 'My Kinky Four-In-A-Bed Orgy With Tommy'."

Another News of the World freelance reporter was Alan Caldwell. This is the
Stephen George account of some of Caldwell's testimony:

"Claims to have received calls about TS from a contact who is a businessman
and an ?unashamed? swinger. Evening Times, who sacked him shortly
afterwards, refused to touch the story, but N of W carried it on 30th
October 2004. Caldwell refuses to name this anonymous source, because it
would damage him as a businessman. The total hypocrisy of this position,
where Caldwell makes his living by attempting to damage the reputation of
others, is shown up by Richard Keen QC, but Lord Turnbull does not insist on
the source being named.

"Claims that his contact also told him that TS visited a swingers' club
called Chambray in Sheffield in February 2006.

"Richard Keen QC: Do you think my client is a complete idiot, that while
preparing a case for defamation against the News of the World, he would
visit a swingers? club?

"Alan Caldwell: It would appear to be unusual."

It is quite striking that the judge allowed not just all sorts of hearsay,
but even anonymous hearsay. I guess the rules of evidence in Britain permit
it -- at least if you represent someone as powerful as Murdoch.

At any rate, we see that the people who were the original main sources of
the stories contradict themselves, admit under oath that they fabricated
outrageous specifics and incidents, and there is no corroborating physical
evidence *at all* to the things they claim *not* to have made up, and they
were paid in one case (McGuire) £20,000, plus at least three weeks at a
Hotel and flying lessons, and in the case of Anvar Khan she's reached a high
point in her career as a purveyor of these sorts of tales in what she admits
is at least a partly fabricated tell-all book, all the while admitting that
she feared for her job had she refused to testify at the trial, while
promoting herself as a "media whore" willing to make stuff up for 100 quid.

Perhaps not in Britain, but at least in the U.S. there is a legal principle,
"falsis in unum, falsis in omnibus ? false in one thing, false in all
things." This is an instruction to a jury that if they conclude a witness
lied about any material fact in what they said, they are entitled to
disregard the entire testimony from that person. By that standard, the two
NotW stories, after the testimony of the two main sources behind them, were
left *completely* unsupported. 

Two middle-aged women who claimed to have witnessed one of Sheridan's
escapades were promised £7,000  each for their testimony by News of the
World. One of the two was also shown to have tried to peddle the same story
to another paper for money previously.

This is why it is so extraordinary and so telling that, as far as I can tell
from reading dozens of articles on this case, quite a few either openly and
viciously anti-Sheridan or poisonously slanted against him, that not one
single scrap of documentary evidence, a receipt, a parking ticket, a hat
check ... nothing at all ... was presented by the paper in connection with
the two main sources of the articles. 

To sum up: the paper's sources, editors, staff, and freelancers quite freely
admitted a) paying people many thousands of pounds for stories; b) Making up
stuff about what really happened to put into those stories; c) inventing
non-existent people as the source of the information (McGuire's "friend" who
was the source her account was attributed to in print); d) Making no
requests from sources for documentation for their claims; and e) Making no
independent inquiries of their own to try to verify their sources stories. 

And all that even though these accounts were, if printed, quite clearly
actionable. I submit NOT EVEN the notorious British tabloid press could
possibly survive if it handled all its stories on public figures in this
way, as the costs of litigation would become prohibitive. Even in the
business of defamation and innuendo, some care must be taken, otherwise you
would soon be out of that business.

The reason for the recklessness was the target: the most prominent socialist
leader in Scotland, leader of a party with a mass audience, with several
members of the Scottish parliament.

Incredibly, in a special "All members Bulletin" put out after the trial by
the anti-Sheridan apparatus of the SSP, the idea that the Murdoch press
would specifically go after the most prominent socialist in Scotland is
dismissed as absurd. 

"The lurid allegations about Tommy Sheridan's private life were certainly
distasteful. Intrusion into people's private lives has for long been a
trademark of the British tabloid press. 

"But this grubby form of journalism has never been driven by politics. The
News of the World is just as likely to target a right wing Tory cabinet
minister or a member of the royal family as a socialist politician.

"Moreover, the newspaper which Tommy himself until recently wrote for, The
Mirror, has never been averse to exposing sex and drugs scandals, with
recent targets including the supermodel, Kate Moss, John Prescott and Simon
Cowell."

But testimony at the trial from NotW staff showed that Sheridan was
specifically, consciously and individually targeted by the Murdoch smear
machine. The person who wrote the first story (about the drunken MSP and
Khan), cross examined by Sheridan (who part way through the trial fired his
lawyers and instead presented his own case) at first denied working on any
other stories about Sheridan but then was forced to admit by his questioning
that she had been sent to knock on his door to ask Sheridan's wife about
supposed cosmetic surgery she had had. I'm not quite sure how the
Murdochites were planning to spin that supposed fact, but I'm sure they had
something in mind.

The corroboration that the Murdoch lawyers relied on at the trial did not
come from documentation of the events or witnesses who'd seen Sheridan
arriving at hotels or clubs and so on. 

It was instead the alleged minutes of a Scottish Socialist Party Executive
Committee meeting called to discuss the first article run by News of the
World, about an unnamed "married MSP [Member of the Scottish Parliament]"
(who most people at the meeting assumed was Sheridan) and his relations with
Khan. 

Those minutes only surfaced in May, 2006, but many of those present at the
meeting swore in court that they were true. Others testified that they were
a fabrication. 

The first to testify was Allison Kane, who was the lead witness at the trial
as she was about to go on holiday to Cuba.

>From Stephen George's account:

"Richard Keen (Tommy?s QC): Do you regard Graeme McIver/Rosemary Byrne/Jock
Penman/Patricia Smith/Professor Michael Gonzales/Steve Arnott/Charlotte
Ahmed [each taken as a separate question] as a decent and honourable member
of the SSP?

"Allison Kane: Yes. 

"Richard Keen QC: None of these people ever saw a minute of this meeting,
not until May 2006 when it was suddenly produced. How do you account for
that?

"Allison Kane: You?ll have to ask them that.

"Richard Keen QC: I?m asking you, whether you have any explanation as to why
that is. 

"Allison Kane: [as though coached in restricting herself to this answer,
this time more defiantly/ petulantly] You?ll have to ask them that."

Keith Baldassara was another of NotW's SSP witnesses:

"Mr Henderson, QC: Can you explain why the leader of the party, Colin Fox,
does not seem to have seen the ?minute? of the EC meeting of 9th November
2004?

"KB: I think Colin will have to explain that.

"Mr H: How would the leader of the party not know its worst secret?

"KB: [in mantra mode] I think Colin will have to explain that."

According to these minutes, Sheridan confessed to visiting the swinger's
clubs (i.e., being the drunken MSP of what Khan admitted under oath was a
tall tale, at least in many of its most salacious details), and essentially
invited the EC to participate in a criminal conspiracy. According to one of
the SSP EC members who testified against Sheridan, even as he was confessing
to the EC and inviting them to join him in a criminal conspiracy, Sheridan
knew that detailed notes were being taken of his proposed criminal course
for the minutes. 

Moreover, the minutes themselves reflect that Sheridan also knew that the
room was full of his internal political enemies, but nevertheless he
confessed and proposed what was essentially a criminal plan of action, suing
News of the World once they named him (which they did a few days later) by
perjuring himself and suborning the perjury of others. 

And being perfectly aware that this double confession was being taken down
by his political enemies, he didn't even try to stop that.

I will admit to finding this scenario hard to credit. 

But even supposing that the substance of the matter is true, it is even
harder to believe that such minutes would have been produced in such detail,
and that even if such minutes were taken, all copies were not ordered
destroyed at the next meeting of the EC, when they would have been presented
for approval, with the EC deciding that instead only an abbreviated set of
minutes, indicating the general area of discussion and concern, and the
resulting motions, be drafted. 

But the decision, incredibly, was BOTH to suppress the minutes (by not
distributing them) AND to preserve them (by keeping one copy). Assuming this
account is accurate, this would have meant that the main protagonist of this
meeting would not have seen a copy of the statements attributed to him.

Moreover, when the Murdoch lawyers mysteriously got wind of the minutes, one
of the SSP leaders, rather than discovering that somehow the only copy had
gone missing, instead confirmed their existence and that they were in his
possession but went through what Sheridan's backers claim was a charade of
going to jail instead of handing them over.

Frankly, if Tommy Sheridan had in reality proposed the scheme outlined in
the minutes, the appropriate response by the EC wouldn't have been to ask
him to resign as convener but to simply drop him from the rolls as being
quite evidently brain dead. And after producing such minutes and making sure
they were BOTH suppressed AND preserved, then the EC members should have
stricken themselves from the rolls for the same reason. 

The comrade who went to jail to confirm that the (lest we forget, alleged)
minutes were extant was only freed after the pro-Sheridan majority of the
National Council voted to have him hand over the document. That meeting, at
the end of May, ALSO voted to support Sheridan in his suit against Murdoch.
A decision which the EC and party press disregarded. 

The anti-Sheridan SSP leaders claim that this decision of the pro-Sheridan
NC left them no choice but to testify, that their testimony was compelled
and that to have claimed on the stand that they could not remember or
something like that would not have been credible.

Reading the protests of the anti-Sheridan folks gives me a strange feeling
of Deja Vu all over again, as if they had been channeling Ken Starr and the
Clinton impeachers who claimed it wasn't the sex but the lies. Indeeed, the
12-page all-members bulletin put out after the trial by this faction is
titled, "the fight for the truth." 

But, as it turns out, it appears that what was found incredible by a
majority of the jury was the anti-Sheridan SSP witnesses claims about
Sheridan's extraordinary confession. And it appears this has now exposed the
SSP members who testified against Sheridan to substantial legal jeopardy, as
the cops say they're investigating possible perjury during the trial.

They would have done better to not cooperate with Murdoch and his lawyers.

Most striking to me is the failure of Sheridan's political opponents on the
left to give a more-or-less honest accounting of the trial and how the main
witnesses against Sheridan admitted under oath having lied and were shown to
have presented wildly different versions at different times of what
supposedly took place, the failure of these opponents to note the absence of
*evidence,* their trying to minimize the significance of the £20,000 payment
for McGuire's story and all the rest of it.

Instead we have this extraordinary 12 page "All Members Bulletin" issued by
the anti-Sheridan forces in control of the SSP apparatus. In 12 tightly
packed pages of small type, charge after innuendo is hurled at Sheridan,
everything from being a Stalinist to another Lula to the source of various
press articles attacking the SSP.

There is account after account of supposedly private conversations between
Sheridan and various and sundry people; yet the author does not have any
room to say *ANYTHING* about the testimony and evidence presented (and NOT
presented) at the trial, and most especially the testimony of the sources of
the Murdoch articles and the editorial staff that worked on them that
completely discredited these articles in the eyes of the jury majority.

The 12-page bulletin denies that the NotW articles about Sheridan were a
politically motivated attack: 

"From the outset, Tommy Sheridan attempted to portray this court battle as a
heroic political stand against the 'evil Murdoch empire'. It was nothing of
the sort.  It was a sordid little dispute between Tommy and the local editor
of the Scottish edition of the News of the World" and goes on to argue is
essence that Sheridan and the SSP were too little a fish for Rupert Murdoch
to have concerned himself with. 

As if political criteria played no role in the selection especially of the
editors of Murdoch's papers, or those they report to in the corporate
ladder. This is the way you make a career in the bourgeois press, by
demonstrating your political loyalty and reliability. A Scotland sub-editor
of the News of the World would have needed no instructions to go after
Sheridan, for if he were as clueless as the author of the "All Members
Bulletin" pretends to be, he would not have gotten that post.

There is even a completely disingenuous defense of the extensive, detailed
minutes of the EC meeting where Sheridan was asked to resign:

"In a party like the SSP, not everything is minuted. Considerations of time,
space and relevance all have to be taken into account. But there can no
question that key decisions affecting the future of the socialist movement
have to be explained in written form. 

"The November 9 was not a routine, run-of-the mill meeting. This was a
historic event. When the most charismatic and popular socialist leader in
Scotland for a generation and more is forced to stand down from his position
that requires an explanation."

However, these minutes were not that explanation, for according to the
anti-Sheridan group's own account, they were kept secret and only one copy
was preserved. Sheridan and several other party leaders say that they never
saw these minutes until May of 2006. These were *secret* minutes, and
therefore unable to play the role that here is ascribed to them.

Moreover, the EC pressured Sheridan to resign and publicly give false
reasons -- wanting to spend more time with his family. Given that, how to
explain the decision to keep these extremely detailed minutes attributing to
Sheridan not just a confession of the truth of the first of the NotW
articles (the Khan-based piece) but also a confession of his supposed
intention to commit perjury and perpetrate a fraud upon the courts?

I do not think there can be the slightest doubt after the trial that the
articles against Sheridan were a politically motivated attack by the Murdoch
press: even a majority of the jury, who presumably are not politically
sophisticated people, saw this was the case and gave Sheridan the largest
libel award ever in the history of Scotland.

The official Socialist Resistance statement quoted on this list at least
does not deny there was a political character to this trial, but agree with
the 12-page bulletin that it wasn't about a socialist defending himself from
the Murdoch gutter press. It approvingly quotes the Guardian newspaper "that
the trial was not about class but about gender....

"As [Guardian writer] Julie Bindel observed all but two of the witnesses on
Sheridan?s side were men and most of the witnesses against him were
women....

"In court Sheridan claimed that there were two separate conspiracies against
him. The first by the NoTW, which he said had been out to get him for a long
time, the other by a faction inside the SSP leadership who were out to oust
him as part of a political take-over. This was nonsense but it neatly
diverted the proceedings away from eye-witness accounts of sexual
activities, some of which were difficult to rebut, to political conspiracy
theories which the jury were hardly in a position to assess."

First, it is beyond me how so many who claim to be socialists can say that
the News of the World wasn't out to get Sheridan, that this was "nonsense."
Nor that a jury was "hardly in a position to assess" the idea that the
notoriously and viciously right-wing Murdoch press would seek to defame the
most prominent socialist in Scotland precisely because he was a socialist.

Second, far from being "difficult to rebut," most of the socalled
"eye-witness accounts of sexual activities" bought and paid for by Murdoch's
agents were impossible to believe, because both Khan and McGuire admitted to
being party to complete fabrications in the accounts as published -- and not
mistakes or misunderstandings, but conscious, deliberate fabrications quite
transparently designed to present Sheridan in the worst possible light. 

They were the main sources of the stories printed by the Murdoch press.
Plus, both of them, and the two middle-aged women who claimed only to have
observed another one Sheridan's alleged sexual escapades, were paid by NotW,
and in McGuire's case, she was also blackmailed.

In the concluding speech to the jury, Murdoch's lawyer was reduced to
arguing that at least one of their witnesses was credible: "If you believe
only Katrine Trolle in this case ... she proves adultery, she proves the
Cupids visit, she proves group sex, she proves hypocrisy." Katrine Trolle is
an ex-SSP member who testified she had an affair with Sheridan that included
a visit to the Cupids "swingers club."

Unlike the four other women, she hadn't gotten money from News of the World.
Unlike the two other women who claimed to have had sex with Sheridan, there
was at least some circumstantial corroboration -- records of phone calls and
testimony of her roommates that saw her and Sheridan arrive at their house
together and go up to her room.

Perhaps most importantly for the NotW lawyers, unlike the other two, she did
not testify under oath that she had borne false witness against Sheridan in
the pages of the Murdoch gutter rag. 

But that was because she hadn't been the source for NotW stories. And a
juror could well have believed both that Trolle told the truth, or might
have been, about having had an affair with Sheridan AND that the News of the
World nevertheless defamed and libeled Sheridan with the accounts it did
print, since  what might be views as the most damaging details were admitted
to --under oath-- as having been fabrications. 

Murdoch didn't print Trolle's story of a half dozen encounters as she told
it in court, it printed instead completely outlandish tales of alcohol and
cocaine-induced debauchery (including domination, sadism, and various
fetishes) involving dozens of incidents. And, AGAIN, the main sources of
THOSE accounts admitted to being party to fabrications in those stories and
gave the court accounts of what happened different than those that appeared
in print.

However, be it added about Trolle that her testimony was sharply challenged
by Gail Sheridan, who said Trolle's sworn account of her assignations was
preposterous. Details like that Tommy Sheridan had supposedly taken Trolle
to the home he shared with his wife, across the street from his sister in
law and at a time when TS's  own sister was staying with Tommy and Gail, and
that they each had a glass of wine before he took her to the master bedroom.


An account of Gail Sheridan's testimony from the Scotsman:

"'You would not know one end of a wine bottle from the next,' Mrs Sheridan
said. 'You would not know where it was kept. If I read tea, yes. But wine?
Ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.'" Sheridan is described in all the media
as a non-consumer of alcoholic beverages.

In addition, Gail testified that she had run into Trolle, who was a
prominent SSP member, shortly after the NotW printed the McGuire-based
article which implicated Trolle.

"I was pregnant at the time and she was up hugging and kissing me, wanting
to touch my tummy and saying how terrible it was, all this Fiona McGuire
stuff in the paper, and that the News of the World had been at her door
offering her money. I know Katrine Trolle very well. She is pally with
Allison Kane and the rest of them, Rosie Kane and Carolyn Leckie [others
within the SSP]. They have had it in for you for years. You were warned
about it, but you chose to ignore it. I warned you, your mother warned you,
your sisters warned you, people in the party warned you, people in the media
warned you, for that matter."

But the point that impressed the media most in Gail Sheridan's testimony
--and perhaps the jurors, too-- was a distinctive physical attribute of
Tommy Sheridan when disrobed. According to the Scotsman's account of Gail
Sheridan's testimony:

"'He looks like a gorilla. He has more hair on his body than on his head,'
she told the jury. Turning back to her husband, she continued: 'You seem to
have had affairs with everybody and their dog, but there's been no mention
of that.'"

It is a telling point, because it is precisely the sort of detail even an
incompetent hack wouldn't just have included in a story, but would have
headlined: "My Kinky Four-In-A-Bed Orgy With 'Gorilla' Tommy." 

That is the sort of intimate detail that give stories of this kind
credibility. That is also an important reason why Khan and McGuire accounts
had so many invented and outrageous details when printed. Tales of swingers
clubs, nipple clamps, cocaine, and so on are more *credible* than a simple
account of a few quiet assignations.

Another perhaps small point that raises questions about Trolle's
credibility. She is saying now that she was never offered money for her
story. But at the time of the article involving her, Gail Sheridan
testified, when Trolle was insisting it was all lies, Trolle said NotW *had*
offered her money. This is standard operating procedure for this kind of
gutter rag; moreover, Trolle's prominence as a 2003 MSP candidate and her
overall "respectability" would have made her story worth much, much more
than that of McGuire, and they were willing to pay HER 20 kiloquids.

I find very hard to believe Trolle's statement about this very material
fact: "I was never offered money," she says. Even completely discounting
Gail Sheridan's testimony it doesn't seem credible. She was approached by
NotW at the time of the original article and that means certainly she was
offered money. 

*  *  *

The Guardian story that appears to have inspired much of Socialist
Resistance's statement starts: 

"'Whatever their views of Tommy Sheridan,' says Catriona Grant, former
Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) activist and witness in the Tommy Sheridan
libel trial, 'folk need to realise that this case was a fight between men
and women. This was not about class, but gender.'"

That is a completely astonishing thing to say. This case was about lying
articles the Murdoch press printed to smear the best known socialist in
Scotland in an attempt to destroy him politically. 

The sources of those articles yes, happened to be women, but they were
acting as paid agents of Murdoch's propaganda machine, in at least one of
those cases under duress, and in that capacity, as they confessed in court,
under oath, they put into the articles all sorts of fabrications.

The two middle-aged women who claimed to have seen Sheridan having sex with
other folks peddled their story to the press for money after the original
articles came out.

How can people who allowed themselves to be bought and used by Murdoch's
anti-working-class, racist and sexist propaganda machine be considered to
have been somehow representing the cause of *women* in this case?

And how can socialists in 2006 accept such a crude counterposition of class
and gender, as if the two things had nothing to do with each other. There
was a gender issue most definitely involved here, which was the Murdoch
press's use and abuse of these women and their reliance and re-enforcement
of all sorts of sexist stereotypes.

The anti-Sheridan faction's account of the EC meeting doesn't sound very
likely to my ears, and the decision to minute it in such detail and preserve
those minutes, even while keeping them secret, goes beyond straining my
capacity for a conscious suspension of disbelief. 

But even taking at least the core of the account as true, that Sheridan
admitted to sexual indiscretions, there is a tremendous distance between
that and the tales of what many if not most people would regard as
degeneracy concocted by Murdoch's scribblers. We know for a fact that the
story based on Khan's account bristled with fabrications: that was HER OWN
sworn testimony, and that was the only story that had appeared when the EC
meeting took place. 

Given this hypothetical scenario, that the core essence of the minutes is
accurate, the fabricated nature of the details in the story would have been
known to Sheridan at the time of the EC meeting. 

And it is hard to believe he would not have argued in essence look at all
these assertions that are fabricated. Instead he is said by the minutes to
concentrate on the bare-bones fact that NotW would be unable to provide
*evidence* of what in the minutes is assumed to be an essentially true
account in the Murdoch press. 

But, given what we now know from the trial but was not know when the minutes
were drafted (either in Nov. of 2004 or later), Sheridan would have treated
it not as a TRUE account, as he is essentially depicted as doing, but rather
as a fabricated account with only the tiniest grain of truth at its core. 

ONLY if you assume that Khan LIED at the trial about fabricating stuff to
"puff" her book, and the original NotW account is in fact what actually and
truly took place, do Sheridan's statements and stance as ascribed to him in
the minutes make any sense. 

However, if you assume the minutes actually contain only a tendentious and
distorted version of what Sheridan said, or better yet, a completely
fabricated one, then things do make sense. The drafters of the minutes would
assume the story as presented in the News of the World would be sworn to in
court. Its truth would be binary -- either Tommy did it or not. 

They could not possibly have guessed that the argument of NotW as made
through its witnesses would be, in essence, sure we fabricated all this
other stuff, but these two or three or four things really are true. Trust
us. Because the response of a jury is going to be, "How can we possibly
believe you now when you're confessing under oath to all these
fabrications?"

But even with that, what was done at the meeting sounds completely wacko. To
force Sheridan to resign at that moment was to join Murdoch's crusade
against him. Moreover, to draw up such detailed minutes on this sort of
issue -- what *political* purpose did it serve? Even if they had been
*accurate,* which, given how the case turned out, is impossible to believe,
the only point I can see to it is factional.

There are really only two theories that seem to be a reasonable fit to how
the case developed in court. One is that Sheridan's stance in court that
none of this happened, it was all lies, is the truth. The other is that
while there was a grain of truth to the stories, and Sheridan did indeed
engage in some affairs in the past few years, the sensationalist debauchery
depicted in the NotW was a fabrication. 

Either way, in a jury box facing a similar case (but not involving
political/social issues at all), I would not feel it necessary in my own
mind to resolve which version was the actual truth before I could find the
newspaper guilty of libel and award damages. 

The one thing presented at the trial that actually does not fit at all
either of these two scenarios is the account of what Tommy Sheridan told the
EC as relayed in the official minutes. It is impossible to avoid the
conclusion therefore that the statements and stance attributed to Sheridan
in the minutes were either completely fabricated out of whole cloth, or
quite consciously, poisonously and selectively slanted so as to make it seem
Sheridan was admitting the truth of the entire NotW account. Moreover why
the minutes would be drafted this way is obvious, based on the supposition
that NotW would go into court defending that account in toto or nearly so. 

No other conclusion is possible but that Sheridan and a few others are
telling the truth when they say the minutes bear false witness, but from
this, the inescapable conclusion flows that Sheridan is also right in saying
there was a cabal in the leadership against him and that they seized on this
incident to accomplish their aims, for how else could such minutes get
drafted and how else could they get vouched for by so many members of the
leadership?

This is a sad --tragic, in fact-- state of affairs, but my experience on the
left tells me it is an entirely plausible scenario, and the only one that
really stands up to close contact with the facts as they have been reported
piecemeal and I have been able to piece together. 

This also tends to confirm that Sheridan is telling the truth, pretty much
about everything, or very nearly so.

(I do not rule out absolutely that Sheridan might have had a fling after
marriage, but nothing resembling what was in NotW, nor what was claimed in
court to be the true part of those articles. But even were I to know for a
fact he had had an affair, I would not demand that he admit it, I would not
condemn him for denying it, and I would not think any the less of him for
that circumstance. People are, well, people, quite imperfect and socialized
in certain ways which we may be conscious of trying to overcome and even be
in denial about not always succeeding. 

(There was in Marx's life a similar circumstance; Engels, ever the loyal
friend, took the fall so that Marx would not have to. It does not reduce my
admiration for Engels; quite the contrary.)

*  *  *

One final point. Perhaps in the U.K. there are legal restrictions in what
you can say in connection with a case in court. Not so where I live.

It strikes me that there are various aspects of this that smack not just of
a Murdoch smear job, but of a political police operation in the style of the
U.S. Cointelpro programs. 

Especially how Murdoch's lawyers were able to get orders to appear to
testify for a whole series of SSP leaders. 

The Socialist Resistance comrades say, "Remarkably they were able to make
these citations because of a fabricated set of minutes of the meeting (as
opposed to the official minutes) which had been sent to the NotW
anonymously, presumably by Sheridan or one of his supporters. Who else would
fabricate minutes to his advantage?"

But this is a complete non-sequitur. How could getting into the hands of
Murdoch's lawyers a piece of paper that allowed them to operate along the
lines of cleavage within the SSP be to Sheridan's tactical advantage at the
trial? What possible benefit could Sheridan derive from informing Murdoch's
lawyers about the EC meeting where he was asked to resign, and having that
become part of the court record? At the very least, it suggested that the EC
believed the lying fabrications that had been published by NotW, and turned
their backs on him as a result. 

Actually, the faction that did have an interest in making this information
available to the NotW lawyers was the anti-Sheridan faction. Their
calculation would have been something like:

If Sheridan wins his case, he will stand vindicated, and we condemned for
having forced an innocent man, falsely accused of all kinds of degeneracy by
a giant ultrarightist corporate media cartel, to resign as head of the
party, instead of standing with him against Murdoch and his minions. These
statements by Sheridan admitting to, in essence, the truth of the first
article against him will prevent that outcome. (They did not and could not
have known that the testimony of NotW's own sources and staff would
irremediably and definitively discredit the article.)

But if they sent in the real minutes, of which there was only one copy, that
would immediately finger a the culprit. Thus other minutes would need to be
drawn up, but these needed to be seen as coming from somewhere else, hence a
pro-Sheridan slant.

But in reality, the most logical, indeed the OBVIOUS explanation is that the
"bogus" minutes came from the political police, the secret service, MI-5 or
whatever you want to call it. Perhaps their origin might have been an
attempt by Sheridan or friends to reconstruct what in their view really
happened at the EC, but sending them to the enemy camp in the lawsuit is so
obviously a counter-productive and self-defeating move given the existence
of the official minutes that the idea that the Sheridanites were the ones
who sent them anonymously to NotW lawyers can be discarded.

Or the unofficial minutes may have been drafted by the cops themselves. A
group like the SSP certainly has government agent infiltrators who would
have been privy to all the rumors and scuttlebutt around this, the verbal
reports given the membership about the real reasons for Sheridan's
resignation, and so on. And monitoring of emails and possibly hacking into
people's computers meant they had probably had the real text of the official
minutes all along if this was drafted contemporaneously with the meeting, as
is claimed, or at whatever point they were drafted.

It doesn't really matter as to the authorship, for the the cop motives in
sending them to the lawyers are obvious -- to re-enforce Murdoch's side by
getting out (eventually...) the official minutes and help him win, for one;
to maximize the acrimony and divisions within the SSP; to try to set up at
least some SSP members for perjury charges depending on how they testified,
and so on. If it was the cops, the bogus (non official) minutes would be
drafted in such a way as to have each side suspect the other in the internal
party dispute.

The real minutes would not do nearly as well to send it because once the
Murdoch lawyers showed them, the effect would likely be to shatter the
anti-Sheridan block with charges and counter charges about which one of the
leaders had done it and so on, and with the party cohering then around
Sheridan instead of keeping the party fragmented into factions at war with
each other.

Joaquín


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