Far from marking the end of the SNP finances scandal, Peter Murrell’s guilty plea will only up the pressure on Nicola Sturgeon.
Murrell, the former chief executive of Scotland’s ruling party, appeared at Edinburgh‘s High Court yesterday where he admitted to embezzling more than £400,000 over the course of a decade.
Sturgeon, his estranged wife, was the Nationalist figurehead from 2014 to 2023. She led the party to electoral heights once thought impossible, smashing the mighty Labour machine that had dominated Scottish politics for decades.
By her side was Murrell, the Nats’ backroom boss who oversaw a membership explosion that helped fund a sharper, slicker political operation. They were Scotland’s ultimate power couple, darlings of the left-leaning establishment and the toast of chattering-class dinner parties, and for a time it seemed as though they might rule forever.
Then in 2021 Police Scotland launched an investigation, codenamed Operation Branchform, into the fate of almost £667,000 in donations to party coffers from supporters of Scottish independence. Murrell was charged with embezzlement in April 2024 and nine months later Sturgeon announced their separation.
Following yesterday’s admission from Murrell, Sturgeon took to Instagram to say she was ‘utterly appalled’ by his actions and reiterated that she had ‘no knowledge or suspicion whatsoever’ that he had been raiding party funds.
Political opponents quickly moved to rubbish her denials.
Critics want to know how Nicola Sturgeon could have missed high-end purchases like a £3,192 Frank Smythson tea set
Murrell, who oversaw a membership explosion as the Nats’ backroom boss, with Sturgeon on their wedding day in 2010
The former SNP chief executive used the cash to buy items including a motorhome and luxury goods, and towards the purchase of two cars
Jackie Baillie, Labour’s deputy leader in Scotland, branded it ‘inconceivable that Nicola Sturgeon knew nothing about the large-scale fraud, which she benefited from, taking place under her nose in both her party and her home’.
In a scathing statement released after yesterday’s court proceedings, Scottish Tory leader Russell Findlay said Murrell’s ‘crime spree’ had taken place ‘right under her nose’, adding: ‘You would need to be a particularly gullible member of Nicola Sturgeon’s fan club to swallow her preposterous protestations of ignorance about her husband’s criminal racket.’
Bracing stuff given Sturgeon, as she keeps restating, was arrested and questioned by Branchform detectives in June 2023 and released without charge the same day.
The questions, however, remain.
Critics want to know how Sturgeon could have missed high-end purchases like a £3,192 Frank Smythson tea set and vanity bureau, two Bremont World Timer Alt 1 watches (combined price more than £9,000), and a set of £2,600 Lalique salt and pepper grinders.
Then there was the succession of deluxe coffee-makers: the £1,300 Miele 6300 coffee maker in 2014, the £1,900 Jura bean-to-cup machine in 2017, and an upgraded Jura model the following year at a cost of £2,600. By the late 2010s, the Sturgeon-Murrell household could have given Starbucks a run for its money.
Not to mention the infamous £125,000 Niesmann and Bischoff motorhome.
Murrell treated the party’s assets, money handed over in large part by ordinary supporters who believed they were contributing to a fighting fund for independence, as his personal slush fund.
Murrell treated the party’s assets, money handed over in large part by ordinary supporters who believed they were contributing to a fighting fund for independence, as his personal slush fund
Murrell, who was the nationalists’ chief executive for 22 years, is driven away from the High Court in Edinburgh after he pleaded guilty yesterday
The 61-year-old’s ‘crime spree’ had taken place ‘right under Sturgeon’s nose’, Scottish Tory leader Russell Findlay said
Sturgeon is adamant that these were ‘not my crimes’ and that she was ‘misled just as others were’.
For a woman who rose to the top of Scottish politics by being ultra-disciplined, always in control, and on top of every detail, it strikes her detractors as bizarre that she failed to suspect anything untoward, even as her husband went on luxury spending binges that would make Imelda Marcos blush.
Today, Sturgeon has left the political stage altogether and is pursuing a media career that includes publishing her memoirs, providing election punditry on ITV, and appearing in a series of in-conversation-with stage shows alongside crime novelist Val McDermid, where the pair chat books and politics.
Yet her departure from the frontline has not dampened opposition parties’ determination to get to the truth.
Now the screws are turning on current SNP leader and long-time Sturgeon ally John Swinney, with calls for supporters to be recompensed for donations embezzled by the former chief executive.
That is unlikely to happen given how stretched the organisation’s finances are these days. Even loyal backers have grown reluctant to hand over cash in the sums seen during the height of the Sturgeon-Murrell reign. Given how much of their money went towards Murrell’s self-enrichment, it’s not hard to see why.
There are also demands for a review of the extraordinary decision to delay Murrell’s court date until after the Scottish Parliament election. He had initially been scheduled to appear before a judge in February, right in the middle of campaigning for the devolved elections.
An eleventh-hour decision by the Crown Office, Scotland’s prosecutorial service, to delay the hearing until after the May 7 polling day drew outrage from the SNP’s rivals. Spared from having to battle for votes against the backdrop of an embezzlement trial, the Nationalists secured an unprecedented fifth consecutive term in government at Holyrood.
For all the constitutional upheaval it has inflicted, devolution hasn’t changed that much about politics north of the border. The rot now comes with a saltire stuck on it. Everything stinks, the logic seems to be, but at least it’s a Scottish stench.
