Angela Constance row shows a government so immersed in its own self-importance it doesn’t understand right and wrong

When you operate in the political bubble you can forget that for some people politics does not hold the same all-consuming passion or intrigue. And in a week when we discover that at least three SNP female MSPs claim that their own staff had left covert recording devices in their offices presumably in some convoluted bid to catch them out saying something they shouldn’t (and then what?), it is worth remembering that there are actually people that don’t play political games in life because they are guided simply by doing the right thing.

Alexis Jay is one of those people. She is a genuinely decent person. She has no political beef. And she lives out her professional life with the upmost level of integrity and honesty.

I have known Alexis for decades and her passion isn’t politics, it’s child protection. And protecting children from the horrors of sexual abuse in all its manifestations is what drives her, not the ins and outs of political machinations, party point scoring, or indulging in some bargain-basement Watergate. Her currency is her integrity. Her watchword is trust. And her moral compass unimpeachable. But nevertheless, she was sucked into the dirty-dealing minutia of this world of politics where normal rules of engagement appear to not apply when over the last few weeks her value was disrespected. Her words were misused [and that’s being kind] by a minister who applied what Jay had said about a grooming gang inquiry in England to justify a frankly inexplicable political judgement made in another context and in another place.

I knew at the time that what Professor Jay had said about so-called grooming gangs [she would dispute that phrase herself while recognising that abusers come in all shapes and forms and operate individually as well as collectively but that also abuse is abuse, is abuse, no matter the label attached] was being misrepresented as applying to Scotland by Angela Constance, the justice secretary, to bolster the reasons why her government was not launching a similar exploration of what has become an undeniably controversial issue in England.

Cynically, I could see that politically this was about a nationalist Scottish Government making the point – yet again – that somehow what happens in Scotland is different. But – and I hate to break it to them – there is no exceptionalism when it comes to the depravity of child sexual abusers and surely it doesn’t take me to tell them that child predators don’t recognise geographic borders, they peddle their evil wherever they find vulnerability. And Scottish children are sadly no different to English ones in that respect.

Pressed on why Scotland wasn’t having an inquiry into the existence of grooming gangs, Constance said that her view about there not being a need to have one was shared by Alexis Jay. She unforgivably used the hard-won reputation of an eminent child abuse expert to simply shore up her own. And she was wrong. Jay had never said there was no need for such an inquiry in Scotland but when asked about the troubled inquiry down south in which victims have walked away not trusting the process or the individuals involved, she had said that victims just wanted action and didn’t need a new national inquiry given she herself had already led one which clearly spelt out the action needed to be taken. She added that she just wanted politicians to ‘get on with it’.

So, while Angela Constance was technically correct in saying Jay didn’t want another inquiry, that was in England, not Scotland, and frankly you would have thought an SNP minister in particular given the way her party uses England as a wedge issue, would have understood the difference between the two different parts of the country.

What should have then been a simple apology and a correction of the official record became an exercise in obfuscation, arrogance, lies and a breach of the ministerial code that put the whole issue on a rapid conveyer belt to a vote of no confidence in the justice secretary. But of course, given the numbers in the parliament and the way that the Greens will sacrifice their own values to side with their independence supporting colleagues even when the principle at stake is trust and the issue under investigation is as serious as child sexual abuse, she survived. Although a further investigation by a set of independent advisors is still to report on its judgement of the affair.

How tawdry this whole episode has been. How cheap it makes our parliament appear and how immersed in their own self-importance the party of government has sunk that it simply doesn’t understand the difference between right and wrong, even when it comes to something as serious as the exploitation of children.

Over the last few days, I have had various Scottish Government advisors dismiss this as something and nothing. But crucially, how can the survivors of sexual abuse, which is in essence an ugly manifestation of the dynamics of power, possibly have faith in any inquiry into what happened to them if it is led by this shower of self-seeking fabricators?

There’s been something rotten throughout this parliamentary term, an underlying malevolence, a disregard for protocol, a disrespect for the truth, and a dishonesty that Alexis Jay, in all her goodness, has unwittingly held a mirror to. In such a moral vacuum, no wonder MSP staffers feel empowered enough to go round bugging their paymasters without fear of retribution.