Sturgeon may claim she knew nothing of her husband’s wrongdoing, but her position enabled it

I suspect my husband dodged a bullet when he didn’t win the contest to be the SNP treasurer back in the autumn of 2021. But I also know that someone with his financial background, scrupulous morality and strict adherence to corporate governance would not have stopped asking questions just because the leadership demanded it of him. Which perhaps explains why that was one election he was never going to win.

Scotland is a small place. There’s not much that separates any of us from one another. And you don’t need to scratch too hard to reveal that there’s aye someone who kent yer mither. And it’s that ethos of us all being Jock Tamson’s Bairns, all in it together, that allows for the immediate intimacy of a nation in which you’ll always find a friend, no matter where you are in the world, that bonds simply because you’re Scottish. 

It’s why I can sit here as someone who knew both Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell well enough to be entrusted with telling the most intimate story of their lives with the loss of their baby. 

It’s why when you Google Colin Beattie and Douglas Thomson and get an AI summary of a small vignette of Scottish political life that played a walk-on part in the ongoing financial debacle within the SNP, that I know one professionally and I’m married to the other. 

It’s why you can have the former first minister claiming to have no “conscious memory” of seeing a luxury campervan parked in her mother-in-law’s driveway when more keen-eyed locals than her can enthusiastically attest to having seen her shopping locally on the very same day that it was parked there. 

It’s why I can confirm what others have reported that Alex Salmond also told me years ago, that Murrell had stolen from him when he worked in his constituency office as a much younger man. And why, because I knew him, I can also be sure that I wouldn’t be the only one in his circle he told.

It’s why I can recall the very question, rhetorical though it was designed to be, that Sturgeon asked me when she became first minister, about whether it was wrong for her to be the leader of a party that her husband was chief executive of. And I also remember tentatively agreeing with her that if Murrell had been a woman being asked to step down from her role because of a man, wouldn’t we all decry the sexism inherent in that. She was right but the way she had framed the question was all wrong. There were many in her party who voiced concern about the risks of having a husband and wife holding all the power and the purse strings of a burgeoning political party, but she was able to dismiss that legitimate concern as sexist claptrap. Turns out, it wasn’t.

But that’s another symptom of our smallness, that when Sturgeon argues a false equivalent, which she does with some frequency to suit her needs and which she so vehemently did when she claimed no one had specifically raised the issue of embezzlement with her when the question was of a much more general financial nature, it feels impertinent, awkward even, to suggest she had got the emphasis wrong.

And it’s also why we can sit on the biggest political scandal of our times and some will still see it as some parochial housekeeping hiccup explained away by the vagaries of a strange marriage. Our smallness is what helped Murrell cover his tracks and why it hasn’t prevented die-hard loyalists throwing more money at the SNP, even when they can now see with their own eyes what Sturgeon could apparently not, that her husband was effectively running the party of government like his own personal cash-and-carry.

Sturgeon may claim she knew nothing of her husband’s wrongdoing, but her position enabled it. She was the conduit to his criminality. Had she not led the SNP, he could not have continued stealing party funds. If she had acted on the warnings, paid attention to the resignations, or simply confronted what was happening in her own front room, Peter Murrell would not have been able to carry on for so long fiddling the books.

This is not about Sturgeon being held responsible for her husband’s crimes; this is about her responsibility as a party leader and first minister of Scotland to have had proper oversight of the financial dealings of her party. It is about her doing her job. It is about her simply being inquisitive enough to ask questions when others demanded answers. 

Instead, she and others bullied and intimidated members of the NEC, her party’s ruling body, and silenced those who raised those pertinent questions. She signed off the accounts that her own husband was responsible for, and allowed close associates including our current first minister to echo her lines that there was nothing to see. On any measure of governance, it stank. 

I get that divisions back in 2021 were not only real and enforced because of Covid but the deep schisms ploughed through civic and political life by Sturgeon’s intransigence around so many issues created a convenient divide to dismiss critics of party finances as the same conspirators who believed that Salmond had been set up and who wanted the gender reforms to go away.

What Murrell was able to do was to use that easy dismissal of renegades by his wife as a shield. 
And because Scotland is small, and Sturgeon had surrounded herself with a coterie of supine loyalists who did her bidding, suspicions were simply quashed, allowing Murrell, in plain sight, to pay £4,000 for a pair of her old shoes at a party fundraiser while she watched on.

And while the tight-knit, rigid discipline of the SNP used to be seen as its superpower, this financial wrongdoing has exposed how politicians at the heart of our government have become enmeshed, by virtue of their unquestioning loyalty to a cause, in a web of deceit where plausible deniability just doesn’t wash.

The stench from this scandal will eventually bring John Swinney down because he will surely recognise that for the SNP to really recover from it, it needs to distance itself from its past. This isn’t just a party scandal; it’s about how our country is run and by whom, which is why an independent, wide-ranging inquiry is needed if only to allow the disinfectant of transparency in.