It’s the bank holiday. It’s a scorcher. I’m off tidying up the garden. That’s the point though, isn’t it? If you were trying to protect the government politically from a corruption scandal you’d postpone the trial until after the election and put the hearing on a bank holiday too, wouldn’t you?
So let me just make my point here – can anyone think of an occasion when the Crown Office has not bent over backwards to protect the interests of the Scottish Government? It has taken 12 years to hold Peter Murrell to account for his crimes and at every single stage what I have seen is careful political manipulation of anything that could be manipulated.
Knowledge of the impending arrests was almost certainly passed to the First Minister, enabling her to resign a number of days before it was clear she was to be arrested. The media continue to frame this as ‘she just stepped down because she was tired’ and not ‘she left office in disgrace before becoming the first First Minister to find themselves in a police interview room’.
The head of the prosecution service was providing periodic updates on the case to the Scottish Government. There is no question this was politically useful – but appropriate? Personally I can see no public interest in this case, only political interest. It was a personal matter of theft, never a matter of public safety or terrorism or organised crime. Why is the government getting details when it is clearly an interested party with a vested interest?
And then the Lord Advocate was, what shall I say, less than fully transparent about this flow of information when asked in the Scottish Parliament. Once again, there is a surprising and for me strange amount of amnesia which breaks out whenever the prosecution service and government come into close orbit.
Murrell’s trial was scheduled to take place before the election. That was handily postponed. As someone trained in the dark arts media manipulation in the early Blair years, I should have expected it to be rescheduled for a bank holiday. That is when you want bad news to fall if you have the power to choose.
Then again, there is much that is odd. I have been trying (via my few police sources) to get a sense of how much of this is normal. I should stress that I have been told a couple of times that the police team working on the case have been highly professional and maintained proper confidentiality throughout.
But I can tell you that police sources let it be known to the media that they were unhappy with what seemed to be Crown Office slow-pedalling. What I also heard is that they were pretty convinced Sturgeon should have been charged and prosecuted too, on two fronts.
I know this is second hand but I heard this from a source close to the police who told me that if one spouse was involved in fraud or embezzlement in an enterprise which the other spouse was also involved in and they are living in the same household, it would be routine to charge both. Most people notice £400k in their bank account that shouldn’t be there, or a house full of stolen goods, or a new Jaguar
This was a party not loyal to Scotland, to independence, to its members, not even to its elected politicians, only its ruling clique
But what I definitely know (from a number of sources) is that the police believed that the video of Sturgeon being told that the Finance and Audit Committee had concerns about the propriety of the party finances and her putting on a full-throated attack to try and stop anyone looking at the accounts which would have revealed her husband’s crime is a prima facie instance of conspiracy and obstruction of justice.
What do you think? Respected figures with financial experience warn a governing body that the Chief Executive is failing to provide transparent accounting figures which are preventing them doing their job (and which they had a right to have access to) and the head of that organisation who is the wife of the Chief Executive being accused aggressively tries to prevent scrutiny?
You tell me; what is that? An innocent mistake? A naïve fool too trusting to believe anything could be wrong? Or someone trying to cover up political scandal? If it is the latter, that is a crime. Again, I am told the police think it is a crime.
Oh, by the way, when the Treasurer refused to sign off the corrupt accounts, who do you think signed them anyway? Yup, Nicola Sturgeon. Yet she is walking around free tonight. Perhaps she would have been found not guilty, but I refuse to believe that wasn’t all enough evidence to prosecute.
But it is worse than just a crime. This is an absolutely catastrophic failure in the SNP at absolutely every level. Organisations are supposed to have checks and balances on power. That is what the Finance and Audit Committee is, a check and balance to prevent corruption. A serious warning was send to the National Executive Committee. Three members resigned issuing warnings.
And every square inch of the party from top to bottom tried to suppress this information, prevent scrutiny and provide immunity to the Chief Executive and the party leader. This was a party not loyal to Scotland, to independence, to its members, not even to its elected politicians, only its ruling clique.
The only people who come out of this with any credit are those who resigned – among them Allison Graham (who read out the report to the NEC and suffered greatly for it), Douglas Chapman (the Treasurer who tried to stand up for justice and honesty), the others who resigned from the finance committee in solidarity and Joanna Cherry who resigned from the NEC in protest.
I repeat; the money that was stolen was effectively the property of the party membership. Those who enabled and covered up its embezzlement are exposed here. I’d imagine a civil trial for damages against them would be more than uncomfortable.
But I also ask this question more widely – once all of this was public knowledge, which member of the SNP moved a motion for conference for a full inquiry? Exactly who wasn’t putting their fingers in their ears and going la la la?
And incidentally, I know a few of the elected politicians who were horrified by all of this in private and told me that something should have been done, that someone should have done something. I know how hard it is to stand against your own party machinery on an issue like this and we have all seen what happened to Joanna Cherry for trying.
But I sincerely hope there is a lesson for all of them in this. Silence is betrayal, not inactivity. It is not a failure to go above and beyond, it is a failure to discharge a core duty. Mumbling in private isn’t and wasn’t enough.
The SNP needs a hard-core internal inquiry, hermetically sealed from the leadership or HQ
There is one more hero and one more failure in this. Sean Clerkin can have his ‘moments’ but had he not made a formal complaint to the police, the cover-up would have been successful. Sometimes it takes someone thrawn to reveal dishonesty. When it comes to it, he put Murrell in prison, not the police or the Crown Office and certainly not the media.
That was the other failure – the entire media class. Go back and have a read of this. I wrote it when a well-known Scottish liberal commentator wrote an outraged piece in The Scotsman asking how dare people question the impeccable character of Peter Murrell. In that article I simply presented publicly-available information from the time that was plenty to suggest this guy was dodgy.
So why did the entire Scottish media miss who this guy was? Half of his audit committee resigned citing the risk of fraud and not a single journalist in Scotland investigated. That is in part because they all drank the Sturgeon Cool Aid. It was frankly embarrassing. There remains much about the Sturgeon-Murrell era that remains uninvestigated. I wonder if that will start to happen now.
The Lord Advocate (a member of Cabinet) claims she has recused herself throughout (in between her bouts of amnesia) and will now retire. What is funny is just how many prosecutorial decisions have gone Cabinet’s way throughout this, recusal or not. Coincidence I’m sure.
The SNP needs a hard-core internal inquiry, hermetically sealed from the leadership or HQ. A number of the officials who were close to Murrell at the time are still in post. That isn’t credible. The party needs a very major governance review and some very significant rebalancing of power away from the Leader’s Office. Checks and balances must be restored.
The role of the Lord Advocate absolutely must be split. It can’t be political and non-political at the same time. It is possible all the above irregularities are coincidences and not corruption, but if they all maintain a fundamentally corrupt refusal to separate the Executive and the Judiciary, it will always, always look like corruption. The justice system is too important to give off those kinds of vibes.
And no media should ever report Sturgeon again without framing it in this context. This is not a feminist issue, she is not the victim of a controlling man, she wasn’t just ‘too busy’ to check, or whatever shite she tries to roll out in the coming weeks. She will no doubt be ‘devastated’ at ‘this difficult time’. In reality well over twice her annual salary was stolen by someone in her household and as far as I can tell all the proceeds of crime were stored there. Will any journalist in Scotland actually finally ask Sturgeon an actual fucking question now?
But there is one last little chuckle you might wish to have. After all that, we still don’t know where the £650,000 raised by the SNP for a referendum and used for another purpose went to. This is a totally different misappropriation of hundreds of thousands of pounds…
Just an addendum. I popped out and burnt some of the rubbish to sit on this piece for an hour. It was mostly garden rubbish but I had a pile of old paperwork to get rid off. I was dropping a bit of wood on the fire and there it was, staring up at me, just starting to burn, a copy of Scotland’s Future from the referendum. All I could think was that, that hope, that moment, that future – all sacrificed for Sturgeon, all sullied to protect her from a reckoning. And people want to know why I’m angry at her?