Alex Salmond decided that there was little point in giving evidence to the Holyrood Harassment Inquiry yesterday, leaving an empty chair. He clearly thought that the chair could speak more eloquently than could under the circumstances. He may be right.

The committee had refused to publish his submission of evidence (which had also gone to the parallel Hamilton Inquiry into whether or not Nicola Sturgeon broke the ministerial code). Now, every dog in the street knows what Mr Salmond's submissions say because they have already been widely published in the press. They were published in “redacted”, ie censored, form to protect the anonymity of complainants – so it is not entirely clear why MSPs had to pretend that they haven't seen them.

Mr Salmond claims Nicola Sturgeon did not tell the truth about meetings with him; that a senior government adviser had promised to “get him” according to a witness; and that the Scottish Government had been told by its own lawyers that it would likely lose Salmond's Court of Session judicial review.

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MSPs insist their hands are tied by the Scottish Parliament's Corporate Body, which had been advised by the Crown Office that it is not in the public interest for the content of the censored Salmond submissions to be published, even though the public already know what is in them. It is a ruling that could have come from the “Office of Circumlocution” in Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit.

It follows Nicola Sturgeon promising to give the committee access to all documentation it needed except, er, the ones it really needed. In particular the Government's legal advice about Salmond's judicial review. Advice, which once again every dog in the street seems to know about.

Indeed, every dog knows what happened thereafter. The Court of Session ruled in January 2019 that the Scottish Government had behaved “unlawfully” and in a manner “tainted by apparent bias” in its investigation into Salmond's alleged sexual misconduct. That led to Salmond being awarded costs of £512,000. If that isn't a case of incompetence at the highest levels in the Scottish Government it is hard to know what is.

Everyone also knows what happened after the Court of Session fiasco. Salmond was arrested by police and charged with a string of attempted rape and sexual harassment charges – charges of which he was acquitted in March last year. Many of the complaints came from senior figures in the Scottish Government and the SNP. The former first minister of Scotland could have gone to jail for many years, possibly the rest of his life. And people wonder why he's so angry.

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Nicola Sturgeon, who appears before committee next week, says that the conspiracy allegations are nonsense and that he only has himself to blame because his general conduct toward women was less than exemplary. However, he's damaged the credibility of Nicola Sturgeon, the politician he believes stood in the background while minions confected a conspiracy to destroy him.

This is the “witch hunt” about which the SNP lawyer Anne Harvey is now offering a sworn affidavit. She says she received “an improper request from SNP HQ seeking to damage Mr Salmond”. The principal adviser to the SNP Chief Whip in Westminster, Ms Harvey confirmed what many in the party firmly believe, including the former Scottish justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill MP, who is not, as has often been claimed, a bosom buddy of Mr Salmond.

The independence movement has been talking about little else, as party members speculate about the identities of the Salmond complainers. Last year Mr MacAskill revealed text messages from Ms Sturgeon's husband, and party boss, Peter Murrell, to the SNP CEO, Sue Ruddick, talking about “pressurising the police” on their behalf.

Ms Ruddick, yesterday outed herself as a Salmond's complainant, accusing him of an “act of physical aggression” against her which she reported to the police. This is denied by Salmond, and more importantly by Anne Harvey. The former solicitor said “categorically” that there was no such aggression. “I know this because the police questioned me extensively about it and...it simply did not happen as described by Sue Ruddick.” Ms Ruddick hit back saying that there was another incident.

This astonishing exchange lifted a veil on the deep hostility that exists in the SNP over Alex Salmond. He was thought by many to be a bully and not a very nice person. However, people who know him and have worked with him for decades insist that he is no sexual predator let alone a criminal. They believe the former first minister was fitted up to be Scotland's “Harvey Weinstein” – only the clothing didn't actually fit. For many, that is the beginning and the end of the story, whatever the Holyrood committee reports.

MSPs have has been widely criticised for not getting to the bottom of the Salmond affair, but to be fair they're not lawyers. Nor were they being asked to conduct a criminal investigation. To have got to the unvarnished truth, the Parliament would have had to hire someone like the special prosecutor in the US Congress to cut through the legal obfuscation. The SNP chief executive, Peter Murrell, has been repeatedly accused by MSPs on the committee of giving misleading and inaccurate statements.

So, we end where we began with this story: an epic rift between the two most important figures in the nationalist movement, Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon. A tale of conspiracy and deceit that will never go away and can never be resolved. The matter now passes to the parallel Hamilton Inquiry into whether or not the First Minister broke the ministerial code by failing to tell the truth about her meetings with Salmond. It is the oldest question in politics, upon which so many politicians have come to grief: what did she know and when did she know it.

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