Mostly people get the meaning of tragedy wrong. The thing that makes a tragedy a tragedy and not just a sad story is the inevitability. Put everyone back in the same starting position again and run it all again and the same thing would happen. Do it a thousand times and the same thing would happen.
Cancer is not tragic, it’s just very sad. Ego, vanity, pride, hate – these are tragic. Tragedy springs from inside the souls of its participants. On that basis, Scotland is now truly tragic. Take everyone, put them back in the same position they were in in 2015 and restart time. It would all happen exactly the same way again.
Sturgeon would still be Narcissus, the Greek tragic hero who so needed to be loved and liked and respected that she couldn’t see that it was dark, murky water and not a mirror. Give her that power again and she would abuse it again. She’d organise the same rockstar launch gigs, create the same culture of total control, tell the same lies when the truth made her look bad, force out the same internal critics, bully the same people.
She isn’t complex. This isn’t Hamlet. She’s just needy and willing to sacrifice anyone and everyone to her interests. She is sinking deep into that murky water right now and she still thinks another chapter of her book may save her.
Petter Murrell is and always was a squirming little Iago, one of life’s inadequates, a deeply unimpressive man manipulating and lying and cheating his way to power and wealth, an odious, crawling little horror.
Sturgeon’s politicians would be Gloucester, tricked by her Edmund routine into believing the worse of the old king. They would still wander clueless around a stage thinking they were the good guys, unable to see what was really happening.
Why? Because just below them was the party machine, the Gonerils and Regans of this awful tale, there to find out who can grant them advancement and shower them with praise until the moment where advancement comes from plucking out the same person’s eyes. My turn, my turn. (The fact that the quango set best fall into the category of ‘party machine’ here is its own tragedy.)
The poor independence movement? Sorrowful Ophelia, a true and honest soul who is the victim of the self-serving scheming machinations of the powerful; betrayed, destroyed yet faithful to the end. Scotland’s media? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, an irrelevant bit part there mainly to progress the plot forward towards its denouement.
(And I’m Cassandra, cursed with knowing this was all going to happen, trying to tell you for a decade, irritating, never believed and little loved.)
Murrell appears always to have been a petty wee thief, but something happened mid-decade which enabled him to escalate his campaign of fraud enormously
There is no excuse for any of this. I am reading some of the media analysis in despair. I don’t want to be patronising here because a lot of this is being written by young journalists, so let me just offer you this (if it isn’t obvious) – if you don’t want to look like you’re out your depth you need to prepare.
Speaking to a member of the National Executive Committee who is complaining the auditors ought to have caught this? You need to know that the accountants refused to sign off the accounts twice in a row, then resigned and (given that a complaint was made about the finances from the English town where their replacements are based), the firm they replaced them with appears to have reported them to the police.
You need to know that the NEC is legally liable for everything that happens in the party and actually discussed indemnity insurance for individual members to protect them if something ‘bad’ happened. You have to ask why they are complaining the auditor didn’t catch this when the Audit Committee of the party actually warned them and they took no action.
You have to stop ‘thinking things in your head’. I see people saying ‘there are questions for Alex Salmond’s supporters too because this started under him’. This information is publicly available and dropping it into a spreadsheet took us no more than a few minutes. It quickly shows you that in the last five full years of Salmond’s era Murrell stole £5,357.33 while in the first five full years of Sturgeon’s reign he stole £177,605.44.
Murrell appears always to have been a petty wee thief, but something happened mid-decade which enabled him to escalate his campaign of fraud enormously, and whatever that thing is it happened precisely when Sturgeon became leader.
Likewise, I agree, any one of these purchases would look perfectly normal, but I can only repeat – four Gameboys, three hoovers in six months, two versions of Fifa for the Xbox on the same day, a jacket, then precisely the same jacket the next day? Or my personal favourite, an order for two saw horses, presumably for two-handed sawing (plus two identical watches to go along with it). These are noticeably weird purchases.
To just be clear here, the value of the small thefts (not including cars etc.) was (by my calculations) close to twice the take-home pay of Sturgeon herself. I can absolutely promise that I would notice goods worth twice my take home pay turning up in my house in a five-year period. Plus two cars and a camper van.
Then again, perhaps it is worth reminding you that the officially-accepted media narrative in Scotland states that the first time Nicola Sturgeon heard about the allegations against Alex Salmond she immediately totally forgot about it, but the second time she was told she had to run to the toilet to puke. I mean, does that not lack a certain credibility? Would a journalist usually fall for that?
The only reason I’m picking on the news media here is that I believe in you guys. Politics is full of people who talk about the importance of the media and then try to suppress every media story they can. I am not that. I genuinely believe you are and will always be our final line of protection from corruption.
You are literally the only people you could take back in time, reset and realistically hope it produced a different outcome. Please Scottish media, I’m begging you, can you stop behaving like journalism is about ‘letting everyone have their say’. You’re meant to uncover the thing they don’t want to say.
Also, I find that dropping my prejudice to zero is really helpful when gathering information. I run a leftwing think tank but data is data and fact is fact and if it comes from a rightwing think tank then it is just as good data. Almost everything was in the public domain, particularly on Wings Over Scotland. You don’t need to like Stuart to gather and verify information.
The path to independence remains clearly ahead of us, but it is obstructed by the smouldering remains of a political party whose bewilderment at what is happening is painful to watch
This is all a tragedy because culture eats strategy for breakfast and it was the culture created by Sturgeon (and yes, also by Salmond) which caused this. I know Salmond later regretted it (too late…). Sturgeon isn’t the victim here. She is the boss of a man who stole a lot of money on her watch and she was in a sexual relationship with that man. No political leader wouldn’t face these questions.
There is another reason that this feels like tragedy to me. It is because, like all good drama, this has taken me through a wild ride of emotions. By Monday evening I was utterly furious. John Swinney has known the date for Murrell’s hearing since 20 February and I’m sure he knew he would plead guilty. But he scheduled the debate on independence for the next day anyway.
That means one of a very small range of things, from incompetence to deliberately making the decision to sacrifice independence for five years in favour of a stunt that might put pressure on people to keep quiet on the day the headlines hit. You know, like the Deputy First Minister demanded in what looked like a preprepared statement. Incompetence would be the least awful explanation.
But like a good tragedy it has left me with one dominant emotion; numb despair. Tragedy isn’t about being angry at Iago or Goneril or Regan, or heartbroken for Ophelia or Cordelia or Romeo. It is the blank horror of the realisation that our own flaws are our worse enemies, and by the longest possible margin. Tragedy is the loss of hope because hope requires that the inevitable isn’t inevitable.
And that’s where we are now, the end of hope. I couldn’t watch yesterday’s indy debate, but I did try to read it. Having been put in a slumber by the half-arsed effort of Swinney I couldn’t go on when the humiliation began. The SNP is no longer a credible vehicle for independence, at least not in the next five years.
Which makes yesterday the most pitiful possible end to the tragic decade before. The UK is falling apart and rather than step up the SNP actively chose to fall apart simply to appease an ego-monster of a leader who demanded they didn’t look behind the curtain, didn’t ask questions, didn’t double check.
So the path to independence remains clearly ahead of us, but it is obstructed by the smouldering remains of a political party whose bewilderment at what is happening is painful to watch. By the time the Salmond judicial hearing is over we will be the end. There will be little left.
For independence, this isn’t the need for reform. It isn’t a call for penitence. This is simply a clear awareness that we must now die and be resurrected. The only hope amid this final tableaux of corpses and blood splatter is that, mostly, the dying has been done.