Dear SNP – make no mistake, I am very angry at you. Ten years of smug arrogance, a tin ear and a god complex have done incalculable harm to the cause of independence and you deserve what is happening to you. But while I have to do what follows while holding my nose, it is still in my best interests that you don’t make this worse.
And you are making this work. You will struggle to believe I offer this constructively and in good faith, but I do. I have heard from a few sources now that you are in shock, bewilderment, paralysis. It shows. You are not reading the mood properly and you are not handling the strategy well. So with my strategy head on, I offer this.
Understand you must suffer pain
The biggest mistake you are making is misunderstanding the nature of this scandal for the public. They are sick of powerful people abusing their power. They are in a cost of living crisis and the list of luxury purchases is nauseating. They think you’re all at it (unfairly) and that you all have each other’s backs so justice is never done (which is perfectly fair).
They don’t want you to explain yourself. In fact they desperately don’t want you to tell them they they are wrong and you are right. You cannot litigate your way out of this with detail. This is an emotional public reaction. Think Sub-Postmaster Scandal – no-one wanted the corporations to explain how it was just one of those things. People felt an emotional sense of injustice.
If you cannot meet that emotion head-on you will pay a price. The only way to counter the emotional anger being directed at you is penitence. You must be seen to suffer pain. You must be punished, pay a price. If you don’t and people think ‘you got away with it’, you will never escape this.
They do not think you are the victim so pack in playing victim. Not a single person has taken responsibility for what has happened. For an extended period you need a ‘masochism strategy’. Be seen to pay a price. Then and only then is redemption realistic.
This is frayed, not a loose end
You have to accept this reality; this is not a scandal with a single loose end to be tugged, it is a pieces of frayed cloth with more loose ends to tug on that I can count. From what I know of Kirsten Oswald’s time as National Secretary, an investigation into her behaviours alone could keep the newspapers busy for months.
As per Macron’s comments on Trump, perhaps don’t say everything that comes into your head all the time
And the likelihood is that investigative eyes will now stray beyond this single issue. I expect you to be under siege for an extended period. Behave like it. Just now you’re behaving like this will pass soon if only you are patient and keep denying.
Stop talking
On that front, as per Macron’s comments on Trump, perhaps don’t say everything that comes into your head all the time. If Alyn Smith is on TV telling people the £650,000 was found and all is in order, you better be able to put that money on the table tomorrow and let us all inspect it. But since you used it to repay a half-million pounds loan to Colin Weir in 2017 you can’t, so shut the fuck up.
Sturgeon is already struggling to keep all her many stories straight. Every time you speak you create another narrative you have to manage. That is making things worse, and making things worse at this point is indefensible – so stop it.
The hardest line ever
I’ve heard a lot of people say ‘you need to throw Sturgeon under a bus’. I’ll come to that, but it isn’t you main goal. You need to ‘New SNP’ the whole organisation. Rather than all this self-defence and obstruction, Swinney should make a speech to party activists in which he says ‘May 2026 is a line in the sand. Nothing which was acceptable in this party before that line is acceptable now. We failed. We didn’t ask questions, we didn’t think independently and we didn’t listen to warnings. That can never happen again’.
Then you need to find symbolic ways of making that real. If you continue with this pretence that you had a governance review you will make this so much worse. That review was a farce, a whitewash. It produced no recommendations other than to consolidate the power of the leader. When the media realises half of the committee working on the Governance Review resigned in disgust at the whitewash, it will get worse.
I am one of the few people who have read that review (written up here). You really, really don’t want anyone else to read it – so stop talking about it.
Procedures won’t help you
‘We’ve fixed the problem’ is a dangerous line. Do you even know what the problem was? It was governance, but it had little to do with the financial controls in place. I don’t think you understand this yet; your financial procedures were more or less fine but no organisation won’t be robbed from if its governing body aggressively ignores all those financial controls.
Any organisation that ignores conflicts of interest between a married ‘Chair’ and ‘Chief Exec’ (roughly the Sturgeon and Murrell roles) will create undue risk. If you then stack the governing body with nodding dogs and put a functionary in control who is willing to bend and break any rule, you have no chance. And no organisation which overrules serious warnings from its own Audit Committee and accountants has any chance of avoiding fraud.
Everyone knows something went wrong to enable Murrell and you are being seen denying this and refusing transparency – that is exactly what caused this all in the first place.
Ironically, as soon as Colin Beattie was replaced with Douglas Chapman, your financial controls started working as they should (until it reached the NEC). It is remarkable you let Beattie stand again. It was the culture of your party that failed. Do you understand that? Can you change that? That is your problem. It will come back to haunt you if you don’t face this.
This is not going away
You need an independent inquiry. You are right to resist a public inquiry but you need a full, independent SNP inquiry led wholly independently by a KC. No-one believes you. This crap about ‘the police’ being the same as a public inquiry is the stupidest thing I ever heard (which takes me back to ‘stop talking’).
Everyone knows something went wrong to enable Murrell and you are being seen denying this and refusing transparency. That is exactly what caused this all in the first place. Will you never learn?
You can’t save everyone
The SNP is nothing if not protective of its inside clique. But you will not succeed in saving everyone so you must be judicious. Your key right now is not to save (or frankly even help) Sturgeon. It is certainly not to protect Beattie or Oswald or members of the NEC. You’re job is to save Swinney and a much of the top team as possible.
By ‘save’ I don’t mean the others will lose their job, only their credibility. Making people scapegoats isn’t really the point – throwing Sturgeon under a bus won’t actually help. But sometimes you need to reverse the question – clinging on to her and continuing to protect her is extremely damaging.
Sometimes you really do need to make a big show of sacrificing or punishing someone. I’m not sure that particularly helps in the case of Sturgeon. But you absolutely need to put as much distance between the party and her as you can. She cannot continue to be a member. Get her to resign. Get her to take an extended leave of absence from public life.
But if she is determined to make this all about her and to sacrifice the SNP in the process, then you really must take aggressive action against her. I don’t care what your friends are saying – for the voters you need, Sturgeon is now the problem. End of.
Yes, it’s a horrible six months
Another thing I’d stop right now is trying to distract from this. I can see half-hearted attempts to shove out stronger than usual government policy stories. This is mad. You’re just fucking up your best announcements and doing so in a way that will not help one little bit. Focus on penitence. It is far, far too early to try to move on.
Yes, that makes for a rough six months – but that is what penitence means. Pay the price now and with a little luck you might be in a position to start rebuilding properly, perhaps even by this time next year. But keep this incompetent, stunned and dazed media management farrago going and that opportunity may be lost to you.
You are not going to win this one. Take your defeat in good grace, show the emotional intelligence to understand that the public wants you punished, control that process (painful as it is) and stop your incessant yapping about victimhood. It is your best chance.