[SCOT goes POP!] This is, apparently, not a practical joke - Chris McEleny is genuinely standing for depute leader of the Alba Party while still under suspension for "gross misconduct". This is the sort of thing that happens to political parties when the

[ALBA-Bot]

This is, apparently, not a practical joke - Chris McEleny is genuinely standing for depute leader of the Alba Party while still under suspension for "gross misconduct".  This is the sort of thing that happens to political parties when they are disintegrating.

Thrilling news for Alba members this afternoon: if you don't think Chris "Disgruntled Employee" McEleny, aka "Dzhugashvili", has done quite enough to destroy your party so far, you now have a golden opportunity to elect him as depute leader and help him to finish the job.  I honestly thought it was an elaborate practical joke when someone mentioned on the previous thread that he was standing - I thought at most that perhaps one or two Alba members might have nominated him as a bit of a lark.  But no, it's absolutely for real.  This at least explains why after a prolonged period of radio silence, he suddenly started pumping out pro-Alba tweets at the weekend as if his suspension had never happened.

And ah yes, the "suspension".  I'm already picking up a great deal of anger from Alba members, because the very fact that McEleny is able to seek nominations for depute leader reveals an important piece of information that was not previously known - his party membership has not been suspended.  How can that possibly be?  If he's been suspended from the most senior party staff role for "gross misconduct", how can he possibly still have the official status of a "party member in good standing"?  Ironically, his candidacy poses as many awkward questions for the current leadership as it does for himself and his own allies.  I gather some people are on the brink of leaving the party if McEleny's suspension isn't extended to cover his party membership.

I don't think McEleny has a cat in hell's chance of defeating Neale Hanvey for the depute leadership, but just imagine the implications if he actually did.  He would almost certainly be the deputy of the very leader who had sacked him for gross misconduct.  That is not a sustainable situation - one of the two would have to resign, or the party itself would fracture, or both.  He knows that as well as anyone, so exactly what game is he playing?  I can think of two main possibilities - 

1) He thinks if he polls a respectable minority vote in the depute leader election, it'll be his get-out-of-jail-free card and prevent MacAskill from getting rid of him.  I'm not sure that's right, though.  Remember that I had a decent record in Alba internal elections - I'm a former NEC member, I came within 0.5% of being elected Member Support Convener in December 2023, I was a serving member of three national committees, and I was the incumbent Organiser of North Lanarkshire LACU, but they still didn't think twice about expelling me at McEleny's own instigation.  Similarly, I believe Sean Davis was the Convener of a LACU in Ayrshire before McEleny maliciously took disciplinary action against him, but he still ended up effectively being indefinitely suspended from the party.

2) McEleny may be looking beyond his own defeat in the depute leader contest and his ally Ash Regan's defeat in the leader contest.  The idea may be to keep peddling the line that "Scotland needs a serious independence party, not a sideshow" so he and Regan can later claim that Alba have chosen to be a sideshow by electing the MacAskill/Hanvey ticket.  He and Regan would then claim to be acting in the national interest by providing a "serious independence party" in a different form.

I'm not sure if we're witnessing the death spiral of Alba as a whole or merely of McEleny's career within it, but it's likely to be one or the other.  In the meantime, we can look forward to one of the great comedy spectacles of our time as McEleny runs a depute leadership campaign almost entirely on the basis of his claimed "telepathic communion" with the late Alex Salmond, which apparently means that he and he alone is equipped to take forward Mr Salmond's secret-but-brilliant strategy for next year's Holyrood election.  Leanne Tervit set the scene rather well for what we're about to witness in this tweet from a few weeks ago.

Source: This is, apparently, not a practical joke - Chris McEleny is genuinely standing for depute leader of the Alba Party while still under suspension for "gross misconduct".  This is the sort of thing that happens to political parties when they are disintegrating.