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Welcome to Coffee House Shots for Spectators' Daily Politics Podcast.

Alex Salmond has pulled out of the evidence session he was due to appear in front of the Scottish Parliament Committee tomorrow,

on the grounds that the Scottish Parliament has pooled and censored the evidence that he gave.

In this extraordinary development, it now doesn't look likely that his

investigations against Nicholas Sturgeon are going to be investigated at all. I'm Fraser Nelson and I'm

joined by Katie Bowles and James Versaith. Now James, anybody who's tried to follow the Alex

Amin saga will have failed it so convoluted. But why should you care if you don't live in Scotland?

I think you should care hugely because in a part of the United Kingdom, you have got an

extraordinary development today, which raises, I think, big questions about the separation of powers,

which is that the Crown Office, which is headed by a member of the Scottish Government,

pressured the Scottish Parliament to redact Alex Salmon's evidence,

to remove this explosive charge that Nicola Sturgeon broke the ministerial code.

The significance of this is that Alex Hammond and his lawyers have long been concerned

that unless this evidence is

published, if he were to speak about it at the inquiry, he could put himself in legal jeopardy

because of the complicated question of whether the evidence could be used to identify some of the

complainants against him in the criminal case on which he was

acquitted about his sexual behaviour.

There is a judicial review that the Scottish government lost.

There is the question of whether the First Minister misled the Scottish Parliament

...