Alert readers will have noted that last night we took down our story about Scotland In Union‘s spreadsheet of all the various super-wealthy Dukes, Duchesses, Viscounts, Earls, Marquesses, Countesses, Sirs, Lords, Ladies, Colonels and Brigadiers who fund their “grassroots” anti-independence operation. (AGM pictured below.)

We believe we’re entitled under the law to run the article, and hope to have it back up soon, but frankly we don’t even want to think about the cost of calling a top media lawyer on a Sunday that’s also Hogmanay, so that might have to wait a day or two.

And anyway, it’s not even nearly the most interesting aspect of the affair.

When we were sent the document, we quizzed our source at length to check both the veracity and the legality of the document. We sought, and received, a categorical and unequivocal assurance that it had not been obtained through any unlawful actions, saying that we wouldn’t run the story if it had. And we pressed our source – who was and remains anonymous, and contacted us through a “burner” email account – for precise details of how it had come to be in their hands.

We did this because under the Data Protection Act (DPA) it can be an offence to receive confidential/sensitive information, unless doing so is in the public interest. We sought legal advice before we ran the article to confirm that was the case with this particular data, and were told by more than one lawyer that it was.

There are at least six obvious grounds for that belief:

(1) It’s in the general public interest that people know who is trying to influence politics in the UK while seeking to conceal their identity, eg by making donations £1 below the Electoral Commission’s declaration limit of £7,500. This was the case for numerous donors to SiU, who all handed over £7,499.

(2) It’s in the public interest for Yes supporters to know if politics in Scotland is being influenced by large injections of money from outside Scotland, particularly those with a vested financial interest in the status quo.

(3) It’s in the public interest for people considering donating to an organisation like Scotland In Union to know whether their data will be handled securely.

(4) It’s in the public interest to establish whether Information Commissioner’s Office rules have been broken with regard to targeting donors by wealth.

(5) It’s in the public interest to know whether Electoral Commission rules have been broken with regard to declaring large donations.

(6) It’s in the public interest to know whether an organisation declaring itself to be “grassroots” is nothing of the sort, and is in fact representing the interests of a small wealthy elite.

However, ultimately what every single lawyer in the world will tell you in pretty much any given situation is “This is what I think, but of course it’s all a matter of interpretation and there are no guarantees. That’ll be £5,000 please”.

We’ll get back to that in a minute. But what our interrogation of our source eventually revealed was that they were – or at least were claiming to be – a disgruntled senior Scotland In Union insider, either current or former, who was deeply unhappy with various aspects of the organisation’s management and direction.

(The most recent date we could find referred to on the document was 23 July 2017, so it could have come into our source’s hands any time in the last five months.)

And at this point we’d invite readers to imagine just how disgruntled someone from SiU would have to be to leak to Wings Over Scotland, of all things.

So we took steps to confirm the veracity of the document, as we detailed in yesterday’s article, until we were satisfied that (a) it was real, and (b) only someone in SiU could have known the location of the shared, unpassworded Google Drive it was stored on. And then we ran the story, having first meticulously redacted any information that could have been used to identify the donors.

Within a couple of hours, a furious response arrived from SiU’s lawyers – a specialist media-law firm we’d last encountered acting for the Scotsman when we sued it for defamation in 2014 and secured thousands of pounds in an out-of-court settlement.

The letter made all manner of dire threats, some serious and some farcical, but the key thing was that it removed any doubt about the veracity of the spreadsheet – confirming that it was real and only accessible to a handful of senior SiU employees.

And unless SiU’s lawyers were lying (which we’re sure they wouldn’t) then clearly that would make it all but certain that our source was indeed who they’d claimed to be – something we’d had no way of verifying up until that point.

By this stage we saw little benefit in spending thousands of pounds of precious Wings funds dragging a rival specialist lawyer off the ski-slopes and onto the phone late on a Saturday afternoon the day before Hogmanay in order to defend an article that had already been online for hours, when all their advice would amount to was what we already knew from the previous day – namely “there’s a clear public-interest defence, but it’s all a matter of interpretation so, meh, it’s pretty much your call. That’ll be £10,000 please, because it’s the holidays”.

So we pulled the article temporarily, pending some further advice in normal business hours. But that still leaves us with one big question: what is it about Scotland In Union that’s making its own members so incredibly unhappy that they’d resort in desperation to leaking to the officially vilest separatist site of them all?

And our source had quite a few things to say about that, although of course we can’t currently say whether any of it’s true.

– They claimed that despite the vast sums the organisation has raised, most of it has been squandered with very little to show for it – chiefly on excessive staff levels and salaries, including former chief exec Graeme Pearson being on a salary of £1000 a week for one-and-a-half days’ work.

– They told us donations have “all but dried up”.

– They said that ordinary supporters were angry that ex-Labour politicians like Pearson and Pamela Nash were being used to front a group bankrolled almost entirely by rich Tory landowners.

– And they claimed these reasons, rather than disagreements over Brexit, were behind the splitting off of the “Unity UK” splinter group, as well as suggesting that Unity UK may have been offering leaks about SiU to Scottish newspapers.

Yesterday we were also sent more SiU documents, entirely unsolicited and without any prior contact, from a different email account using the name “Data Dump”.

It appears that these documents – including the details of more fundraising events attended by Lords and Ladies and prominent Unionist politicians – have also been sent to other pro-independence sites including Bella Caledonia, who have speculated, apparently independently, that Unity UK’s David Clews (known mockingly in the indy community as “David Spokesperson”) might be behind it.

Scotland In Union appears to be breaking into unhappy fragments. It’s already seen an “intellectual” faction splinter off in the form of These Islands – who were swiftly caught up in a racism row over academic Nigel Biggar‘s views on the British Empire – and now they’ve got a somewhat, um, earthier offshoot in the form of UUK, ranting on Twitter about World War 2 and “the toff-elite” and offering Yes supporters out.

(“Data Dump”, whoever they may be, claimed to us that the Scottish Conservatives also hate Scotland In Union for “stealing their donations and their thunder”, and that Ruth Davidson “despises” SiU director Alistair Cameron. It’s certainly notable that they seem to have closer links to more Labour and Lib Dem politicians than Tory ones, with Adam Tomkins the only elected Tory we know of to have been seen in public with Cameron or SiU, compared to the Lib/Lab likes of Willie Rennie, Alistair Darling, Anas Sarwar, Robert Brown, Jackie Baillie, Pearson and Nash.)

So it may be that we’re seeing the last angry thrashings of this particular organisation. The media has increasingly distanced itself from the group in recent months, and its next accounts (which were due to be filed last month) should be fascinating. We’ll be keeping – within the limits of the law, of course – a close eye on them.