So Peter Murrell, Nicola Sturgeon’s husband and until very recently the long-serving Chief Executive of the Scottish National Party, has been arrested.
Police are outside Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell's home https://t.co/SgTIwXncF0 pic.twitter.com/SKNNFwITMH
— Kieran Andrews (@KieranPAndrews) April 5, 2023
He is reportedly being interviewed by detectives in connexion with the ongoing investigation into what happened to £600,000 the Nationalists raised for a referendum fighting fund. There has been no referendum, yet the money is gone – allegedly spent on other party costs.
We have looked at this story in detail several times over the past few years: people resigning from the SNP’s finance committee because Murrell wouldn’t give them access to the books; the undeclared £100,000 loan from him to the Party at about the time the police investigation was getting underway.
Given the state of play, there is little to add that would not be mere speculation. We will presumably know more soon enough. It does at least seem to explain why Sturgeon suddenly went, despite having “plenty in the tank”.
But it is worth thinking about the impact of all this on the SNP.
First, it seems very likely that had this development taken place any earlier, Kate Forbes would be the new First Minister of Scotland. She lost the second round by the narrowest of margins, and Humza Yousaf was Sturgeon’s anointed candidate.
Even before today, her supporters were not backing down. She refused a demotion from the finance brief and then called out the Scottish Government when it tried to lie about her reasons for going to the backbenches; 15 MSPs who supported her have organised and plan to publish their own policy papers.
Yousaf had already inherited a growing pile of domestic policy problems and had no way forward on independence; just this week he can add to that the need to defend Nationalist justice reforms which deem rapists under 25 years old insufficiently mentally developed to receive prison sentences – from the same Scottish Government which gave 16-year-olds the vote.
Meanwhile recent polling suggests a substantial retreat for the SNP at the next election, with Labour winning back a swath of the Central Belt – the very territory won by his predecessor, retaining which was the best case against choosing the more-able Forbes.
Any lingering Murrellite strength in the party machine – and he was Chief Executive for two decades – will also be further weakened by this development, as it will have been by the humiliating row over secret membership figures which precipitated Murrell’s departure.
The odds of Yousaf falling after the next election, or perhaps even before it, have thus shortened again.
And then there’s the implications for Sturgeon herself. The former First Minister may be stepping back from frontline politics, but as I argued at the time of that announcement, she would remain a potent asset to any future separatist referendum campaign if allowed to depart the stage with her myth intact.
That seems less likely now.
During her last few years and indeed weeks in post, Sturgeon relied more than once on the idea that she and her husband maintained an implausibly-rigorous Chinese wall about not just political matters but their personal finances.
Allegations against Alex Salmond? Not passed on. The loss of over 30,000 party members? She was not informed. A personal loan of £100,000 from Murrell to the SNP? Never mentioned, apparently.
It may be that this line holds, at least insofar as nobody ever has the definitive proof they would need for formal consequences, even if the police do proceed to charge Murrell (and it is worth reiterating that they may not).
But at a political level, the idea that a husband-and-wife team comprising the longest-serving First Minister and the SNP’s longest-serving Chief Executive maintained what would have been a truly surreal culture of secrecy between themselves does not pass the smell test. If history ends up seeing the Murrell Era as a scandal, a measure of that will necessarily stain the Sturgeon era too.