PETER Mullan, the acclaimed film-maker and Scottish Socialist party supporter, has reignited a bitter row within the party by comparing members who gave evidence against Tommy Sheridan in his defamation trial to Jews being betrayed to the Gestapo during the Holocaust.

Mullan accused members, including several MSPs, who were called as witnesses by the News of the World, of being “politically naive” and claimed some took pleasure in giving evidence against the former party leader.

His comments are certain to re-open festering wounds which appeared to have been healed with yesterday’s announcement that Sheridan plans an “amicable divorce” from the party he helped to found.

The MSP aims to establish a new party, Solidarity — Scotland’s socialist movement, which will field candidates against the SSP in the Scottish election next June.

Sheridan won £200,000 from the News of the World after a jury at the Court of Session decided that allegations he was a swinger and a serial adulterer were false. However, the five-week trial — one of the most tumultuous in Scottish legal history — created a split within the party after 11 party members, including several fellow MSPs, gave evidence against him.

Mullan, Sheridan’s most high-profile supporter, said they should have thought about the context before speaking out.

“They kept saying it was about truth, but somehow none of it was about truth. The whole thing was farcical,” he said.

“For any camp to stand up and say, ‘But we represent truth’, it’s like . . . for me, and obviously this an extreme analogy, if a Jewish man or woman is in front of the Gestapo, you don’t say, ‘They’re Jewish’, and you don’t expect them to say, ‘They’re Jewish’. Because within that context, so-called truth is obviously absurd, because you’re assigning a death sentence to yourself.

“For me, that’s what the truth’s about. You can never divorce it from its context.”

He added: “It was a libel trial, it wasn’t OJ Simpson. There wasn’t a corpse, there wasn’t a rape victim. No crime had been committed. And yet you wouldn’t believe it by reading the newspapers.

“I never thought so many would have lined up, not to praise Caesar, but to bury him. And to volunteer information, or what they said was information, to the press.”

Among those who gave evidence against Sheridan was Keith Baldessara, the MSP’s best man and his former parliamentary assistant.

“If Mullan is saying that, it’s a reflection of his political ignorance. Comparing such a devastating period of history with Sheridan’s libel trial sums up the political circus that now surrounds him,” Baldessara said.

Colin Fox, the leader of the SSP, who was also a witness at the trial, said of Mullan’s comment: “It’s preposterous and offensive. It’s an absolutely ridiculous thing to say and completely over the top. It will only make him look silly.”

Mullan said he had never asked Sheridan if the allegations at the centre of the case were true or not. “Whether he did the right thing in going to court is more than open to debate, but as regards ‘did he or didn’t he’, I’ve never asked him,” he said.

“I never understood why there was this weird allegation about hypocrisy. My understanding of hypocrisy is that you say one thing and do another.

“To my knowledge Tommy’s never stood on any moralist platform, he’s never said, ‘This is how you should lead your lives’. What it brought to the fore, [George] Galloway summed up quite nicely, when he talked about Calvinist Trotskyism.

“It brought out a certain kind of puritanical outrage that masked itself as socialism and for me the two are incompatible. I don’t see how you can stand up and be a socialist and want to peer in through people’s bedrooms. That’s totally inconsistent.

“It’s not about imposing your own viewpoints, particularly as regard sex lives. I never asked because I never thought it was relevant. I only thought, ‘You’ve decided to take them on’. Then he won it, which was pretty damned amazing.”

Mullan concedes that Sheridan’s strength, his charisma, has been turned against him. “He’s a great orator. There’s a charisma there,” he said. “There’s no getting away from the fact that envy had a lot to do with it. I think some people within that party felt he was getting all the limelight.

“On a film set, if you’re working with a great actor, you’re just honoured to be around.

“For whatever reasons, certain people figured Tommy was bigger than he should be. That amazed me, because he’s good at what he does. And he’s in your party. You should be pleased.”

Mullan said he was glad Sheridan apologised for calling his former colleagues “scabs”. “He was knackered and he was upset, but he should have taken more time to decide what he was going to say,” he said. “He shouldn’t have said it, and he knows it. You can’t enter into that kind of slagging match. It’s not right.”

The film-maker, whose The Magdalene Sisters and My Name is Joe have won him international acclaim, said he intends to follow Sheridan into the new party.

“My only concern about any new party is that it can’t be politically sectarian. I would never see someone, like those who remain in the SSP, as my enemy. They ain’t my enemy, they’re comrades.

“If they choose that party, that’s fine by me. If we choose to go with another party, that’s fine by us. I hate that political sectarian stuff.

“We’re supposed to be fighting a much bigger enemy.”

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