Excuses, excuses

Today Alistair Carmichael was interviewed on Radio Orkney, where the topic of the interview was, naturally enough, the stooshie over the leaked 'Frenchgate' memo.  In it we discovered that Mr Carmichael has moved on from saying he made an error of judgement in releasing the memo when it was brought to his attention and he is now saying that he did not lie when he said he hadn't seen the memo as he first saw the text of it when it was published in The Telegraph.  Apparently we are to believe that Mr Carmichael, on being told about the memo, did not bother to read it for himself but authorised it being leaked sight-unseen.

I'm not sure how Mr Carmichael thinks this makes thing any better for him.  After all, the word 'memo' generally refers to a short document, maybe a couple of pages at most.  Is he saying that he didn't have time to read it?  Even if he wasn't at the same location as his spad, surely it could have been faxed or e-mailed to him for perusal prior to him authorising the leak.  Whatever the explanation, one has to wonder just how thoroughly Mr Carmichael was doing his job as Scottish Secretary.

 Sometimes in a long-running TV series there will come an episode which appears to contradict the storyline as it has thus far developed.  When this happens, fans will come up with an explanation that allows both the existing story universe and the events of that episode to be true.  It's a form of revers-engineering if you will.  The term used on the internet for this is 'fanwank', and I think that's pretty much what we're dealing with here.