Alistair Carmichael hearing set for September
A full hearing into the election of Liberal Democrat MP Alistair Carmichael is set to take place in September.
The case has been raised by four of his constituents in Orkney and Shetland. They argue that Mr Carmichael misled the electorate over a memo claiming that SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon would rather have seen David Cameron become prime minister. At the Court of Session in Edinburgh, the hearing was set for 7 and 8 September. Mr Carmichael initially denied leaking the confidential memo to the Daily Telegraph. He claimed that the first he had heard of it was when he received a phone call from a journalist. He later admitted full responsibility for sanctioning its release, and accepted that the "details of the account are not correct". The official cabinet office inquiry into the leaking of the memo found that Mr Carmichael had given permission to his former special adviser Euan Roddin to hand details of the memo to the newspaper. Campaigners raised £60,000 in crowd-funding to lodge a legal challenge to his election under the Representation of the People Act 1983.