In the years that followed the Brexit referendum, a not-uncommon refrain from a certain species of commentator was how unfortunate it was that people in England could not vote for that nice, sensible Nicola Sturgeon.
As Westminster, its normal mechanism for breaking deadlocks fouled by the Fixed-term Parliament Act, tore itself to pieces over the referendum, the First Minister’s Holyrood fiefdom looked positively serene. She said all the right progressive things, too.
This posture always required a certain ignorance of the reality of life in the SNP’s Scotland, where the Scottish Government has racked up a truly substantial string of policy failures and never once allowed Sturgeon’s progressive rhetoric to stand in the way of the pursuit of independence.
Now, in the same weekend, we have witnessed her nadir: arrested by Police Scotland and questioned for almost seven hours in connection with the ongoing investigation into where over £600,000, donatd to the SNP for a ring-fenced referendum fighting fund, has gone.
The contrast with Boris Johnson, who announced he was quitting Parliament over the same weekend, would seem heavy-handed if it appeared in a scripted show.
I am no fan of the former prime minister, but the entire saga of his downfall – the photographs, the Gray Report, the Privileges Committee inquiry – pale in comparison to a sustained fraud investigation by the police and the National Crime Agency. Given that he is already presented in some quarters as a unique threat to integrity in public life, just imagine the tenor of the think-pieces if he had been arrested for questioning in relation to something like that.
Any speculation about what happens next must be heavily caveated because we don’t yet know how this story will play out. Sturgeon insists she is innocent, and it may yet prove to be so. We can’t rule out the possibility that the police are beclowning themselves.
But the facts we do know paint an intriguing picture:
At the start of this story, the least-exciting explanation (short of the money turning up) was that the fund had not really been ring-fenced, and had simply been spent on other party costs. This might well still have been fraud, but of a mundane sort.
Yet if that were the case, the money would still be readily traceable through the Party’s accounts. The above seems to indicate that the police are actually trying to find it, and there is a big difference – not least politically – between misspent and missing.
All of which puts Humza Yousaf, how now has the dubious honour of being the only SNP first minister not arrested by the police, in an invidious position. He ran for the leadership as Sturgeon’s heir, and she remains very popular with a big slice of the Nationalist grassroots. That explains why they announced today that Sturgeon will not be suspended as the investigation continues.
But by failing to distance himself from his predecessor, he risks setting a time bomb under his leadership in the event that this story goes somewhere – especially as many of Kate Forbes’ supporters are already convinced, not unreasonably, that she would have beaten him first time round had Murrell been arrested before the close of the campaign.
And barring a truly miraculous escape, whatever happens these events will have done lasting damage to the myth of Sturgeon. In the (increasingly unlikely) event of another independence referendum in the short-to-medium term, she will be a much less potent asset to the separatist campaign.