There was one period, during Nicola Sturgeon’s record-breaking tenure as First Minister of Scotland, when it looked as if it might all come crashing to an ignominious end: the Alex Salmond scandal.
In both the trial, where the former First Minister routed the Scottish Government at a cost to the taxpayer of half a million pounds, and the subsequent Holyrood enquiry, one of the key questions was what she knew and when.
Her defence hinged on the claim that she had “forgotten” about the meeting where she first heard about the allegations against Salmond. This mattered because Sturgeon had written a letter confirming the Scottish Government’s new sexual harassment policy would apply to former ministers only days after one of the complainants had met with her principal private secretary.
The SNP scarcely covered itself in glory at the time. It fought at every turn to prevent the publication of documents, and to prevent key witnesses from giving evidence. MSPs highlighted inconsistencies between Sturgeon’s testimony and that of her husband, Peter Murrell, then the Nationalists’ long-serving Chief Executive.
But hold the line did. The First Minister survived, if not to fight another day then at least to depart on something vaguely resembling her own terms. Yet now the old question is back on everyone’s lips.
Yesterday, Murrell was arrested by Police Scotland in connexion with an ongoing investigation into what happened to £600,000 the Nationalists collected in donations for a ring-fenced fighting fund.
Photographs show officers having erected a crime scene tent at the couple’s home, and they appear to be digging in the garden; police also raided the SNP’s headquarters in Edinburgh.
This issue has been bubbling away for some time. As I noted in yesterday’s piece, SNP members resigned from the party’s finance committee back in 2021 because Murrell wouldn’t let them see the books.
At the time, Sturgeon said she was “not concerned”. But what was the basis of that assurance? As party leader, she had both every right and indeed a responsibility to look into serious allegations about the state of the party’s finances. But did she?
Then, in December, it emerged that the SNP had failed to report a loan of more than £100,000 from Murrell to the party, and that “his identity was cloaked in the SNP’s own accounts”. The loan coincided with the start of the police investigation.
When pressed, Sturgeon did not answer questions about what she knew about it, and when, stressing that it was a “party matter” and “a personal loan” from Murrell. But how many married couples are there where a decision involving more than £100,000 is not even discussed? How many parties where the need for a loan of that size is unbeknownst to the leader?
Now her opponents, both within the SNP and without, are demanding to know whether the then-First Minister had any foreknowledge of the arrest, given its immediate proximity to her resignation and the leadership contest and the likely decisive impact it would have had on the close-fought outcome.
We may never get answers to these questions; already Sturgeon is pulling out of scheduled appearances.
But the circumstances now are different to the inquiry in one key respect: Sturgeon and Murrell are no longer in unquestioned command of the SNP and Scottish Government machines.