Tommy Sheridan sums up: 'case against me is pathetic'

The former Scottish Socialist leader Tommy Sheridan has accused the police and prosecution of mounting a "vendetta" against him by using lies and falsified evidence to convict him of perjury. Sheridan told the jury at the high court in Glasgow that his "life was at stake" if they found him guilty of deliberately lying on oath when he won a £200,000 libel action against the News of the World in 2006, after it accused him of adulterous affairs and visiting sex clubs. Summing up his defence case after his 11-week trial for perjury, Sheridan said he was completely innocent but was being "persecuted" after the prosecution put up a "pathetic" case against him. He told the jury of 12 women and two men: "Ladies and gentlemen, this has been a fair and even-handed prosecution from the start. And, ladies and gentlemen, we know that the moon is made of cheese." He said that during the perjury trial the prosecution's allegations against him had "disappeared like snow off a dyke" as it emerged their claims could not be supported with independent evidence or that key crown witnesses had lied. At the start of the trial on 4 October, Sheridan faced two main charges, one of which had 18 sub-sections. His wife Gail Sheridan, also 46, had been alongside him in the dock facing other charges of lying on oath, but these were withdrawn by the crown last Friday . The case against Sheridan himself was reduced to just one charge with six sub-sections. Alex Prentice QC, the prosecutor, told the trial today that the number of charges were being "pruned" to allow the case to be "sharply focused". Sheridan said a team of up to 24 detectives from Lothian and Borders police had spent 52,000 hours compiling the perjury case against the couple, in a case which had taken three years to come to court. But key parts of the prosecution case had been "dropped like confetti" by the crown. The force had also levelled "baseless and malicious" charges – which were dropped after being proven false – that Gail Sheridan had stolen alcoholic miniatures from her former employers, British Airways. Allegations about his "three in a bed romp" with prostitutes at the Moat House hotel in Glasgow "collapsed like a house of cards in the wind" after the first prosecution witness, Matt McColl, crumbled after just ten minutes on the stand. The allegation that Sheridan had tried to suborn the current SSP leader Colin Fox into lying had been withdrawn after the prosecution accepted it had no independent evidence to support the claim. During an address to the jury lasting nearly three hours, Sheridan accused many of his former allies of being liars. He said that his former friend, George McNeilage, had been "bought and paid for" by the NoW when he gave them a video which allegedly recorded Sheridan confessing that he had visited the sex clubs. He had nine defence witnesses swearing on oath that it wasn't him in the video, including his sisters, life long friends and political associates. This was the "single most important piece" of crown evidence, yet the prosecution had failed to prove when the video was made, and had failed to produce any expert witnesses to confirm it was his voice or that the video was authentic. "You're being invited to make an absolutely enormous decision that's going to affect my life; you're being invited to conclude that the voice on that tape is me and you're going to send me to jail," he said. McNeilage was a twice-convicted burglar, said Sheridan. "For ten times the annual salary of an average worker, a former convicted house breaker would say anything for £200,000." The crown had also failed to produce any forensic or scientific evidence that the handwritten notes which alleged recording him admitting his adultery at a Scottish Socialist party meeting in November 2004 were authentic. There was no forensic evidence about the phone calls and text messages he had allegedly made to key witnesses. Instead, the police ignored evidence from his diary which raised serious doubts about an alleged meeting where the prosecution claimed he tried to get the current SSP leader Colin Fox to lie on his behalf. Sheridan added that key prosecutions witnesses from his former party, the SSP, his alleged lovers and senior journalists on the NoW had repeatedly given contradictory evidence on oath and in police interviews about crucial evidence, but none of them had been investigated for perjury or charged. One senior NoW executive, Douglas Wight, then the paper's Scottish news editor, had lied on oath at the libel trial in 2006 about his paper's payments to prosecution witnesses, Sheridan told the court. In comparison to many prosecution witnesses, his defence witnesses did not "rant and rave" in the witness box or "spew bile" as answers. Instead they give reliable evidence "which supports my innocence," Sheridan said. His address to the jury continues tomorrow.