"I'm confident that I will be exonerated of any wrongdoing."
Was it my imagination, or did she become more flushed with every repetition?
Her mea non culpa may of course be true in a strictly legal sense. But "wrongdoing" covers a broader category of sins. And the bottom line is that she accepted an illegal donation.
She can - and probably will - call on the "Ah didnae ken" defence. She didn't fully understand the rules; or her campaign team didn't tell her what was going on. But try that out when you are next stopped by the police: "I'm sorry, officer, I didn't realise that this was an area with a 30 mph limit." And if she is not responsible for the conduct of her campaign, then who is? And, please, let us not pretend that all this is a technicality.
But to revert to the "wrongdoing", consider these two actions by Ms Alexander:
1. she authorised - or at least allowed - a certain MSP to solicit donations on her behalf, an MSP who was either ignorant of the rules or who chose to ignore them; and
2. she put no backstop (or at least no effective backstop) in place to check that all donations were above board, a somewhat elementary precaution (one would have thought) given the prevailing circumstances.
Neither of these is in itself a crime. But nor are they examples of best practice. Do they amount to wrongdoing?
Let us see what the Electoral Commission will say later this week.
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