To the surprise of absolutely no-one:

Gordon Brown’s election chief, Douglas Alexander, ordered his sister not to resign as Scottish Labour Party leader for fear of causing fallout throughout the Cabinet. [...]

Mr Alexander, the International Development Secretary and one of Mr Brown’s closest Cabinet allies, delivered the stark message to his sister on Sunday afternoon. Mr Brown is also understood to have urged Ms Alexander to stay on.

Sources in Ms Alexander’s camp say that until Sunday afternoon she was on the point of resigning because of the turmoil the illegal donation to her leadership campaign was causing her and the party. One source told The Times: “She was completely down and incredibly angry. She wanted to go but then the message came from London: you must stay. After that we had to decide how to present her decision as a decision made by her.”

The SNP's description over the weekend is entirely apposite; poor Wendy is being used as a human shield to protect Gordon Brown. (I say "poor Wendy" but, if even half of the allegations against her are true, she's up to her neck in it with only herself to blame.)

Alexander's erstwhile campaign manager, the well-fed Jackie Baillie, gave a hilarious performance on Newsnight Scotland last night, trying to pretend that an ongoing Electoral Commission investigation somehow prevented her from answering any questions, insisting on being allowed to finish answers that contained absolutely no information except that she couldn't answer any questions because of the Electoral Commission investigation, and continually repeating the mantra "no intentional wrongdoing" in the apparent hope that Glenn Campbell would eventually get bored of questioning her and go to the pub. When Baillie was asked when she first knew of Green's donation, she gabbled incoherently at such speed that the flapping of her chins started blowing papers off the Newsnight desk. Campbell got bored and went off to the pub.

Wendy Alexander has broken the law. This "no intentional wrongdoing" trope is tripe. A quick recap is in order. She knew that the donor, Paul Green, was in Jersey; Green wrote a personal cheque and personal covering letter, Wendy's campaign team banked it, and Wendy wrote a personal reply. Accepting personal donations from expats is illegal - as Guido points out, this rule was brought in partly to screw Sean Connery, so there's a certain poetic justice there. A leaked list of leadership campaign contributions, 'authored' by her husband, shows that donations from one source were being "switched" to appear under different names before the list was submitted to the Electoral Commission. (As ever with Labour, they show rather more due diligence trying to find the source of the leak than they ever did verifying the source of the original donation.)

And even if all this were no more than some massively unlikely cock-up, Wendy's brother is a lawyer, so he could have told her that "ignorantia juris non excusat" - ignorance of the law is no more of an excuse than ignorance of the facts. She's as guilty as a puppy sitting next to a pile of shit.

Wendy faces her MSPs later today in a meeting at Holyrood. They'll surely offer her only qualified support, and several will be urging her to go. If I were a cynic, I'd say she'll tough it out until after Prime Minister's Questions tomorrow, and then resign before First Minister's Questions on Thursday. This long death-rattle is merely driving Labour even further into the dirt. But then again, that's where they have always belonged.

AFTERNOON UPDATE: "Unanimous support":

Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander has been given unanimous support from her party's MSPs at Holyrood. [...] Labour MSP Duncan McNeil said that Ms Alexander was given backing from her colleagues at their weekly briefing.

Whatever...