[Robin McAlpine Blog] The SNP must get rid of Sturgeon

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The SNP must get rid of Sturgeon

Sturgeon is going to bring the SNP to its knees if the party does not take the threat she poses more seriously. I am desperate to move on from the Sturgeon era but she’s still seeking to exert undue influence over the party and the government even as she is drawn closer and closer to her very last stand. The party must wake up.

I really do want to move on. I don’t want to waste more time on her. When Nicola Sturgeon resigned I begged everyone to observe the time-honoured playground rule of ‘keys!’ – ceasefire, amnesty, peace. I’m not interested in personal vendettas which have no useful function in strategic terms.

But one person simply won’t move on – Nicola Sturgeon herself. Over the summer I gathered what is really a rather alarming picture of a disgraced politician who is nevertheless still seeking to control key aspects of the SNP and its future direction. I genuinely thought the party had more sense than to let her and that she had bigger worries. I was wrong.

I will quickly explain why Sturgeon is such a threat to the party, how she’s still trying to exert control and why this is so dangerous for many of us. But first I just want to emphasise that I’m trying to be restrained here because this is still subject to significant legal restrictions and god knows Scotland’s judiciary are jail-commentators-happy. There is a lot more to this than you yet know.

First, the threat. The facts are as follows: Peter Murrell has been charged and there is a very, very high likelihood of a trial. In fact (I think I can write this without losing my freedom) the reason things are not moving faster is because the police are continuing to run a public relations campaign to force the Crown Prosecution Service to take action which the police believe is necessary but which the prosecutors are resisting.

This case has not been about ‘the missing £600,000’ for a long time. That is a simple matter. Branchform is a wide-ranging investigation into a multi-faceted series of financial transactions which may amount to significant amounts of money which may have been embezzled from the SNP. Sturgeon was recorded urging the National Executive Committee of the SNP not to look into this matter any further.

Meanwhile the Information Commissioner is at his wits end with the most secretive and obstructive government I’ve ever come across. When he eventually prevails (he will eventually prevail) it will reveal more damaging information. That in turn is highly likely to set off another domino topple of more damaging information which could be really, really dangerous for people well beyond Nicola Sturgeon herself.

Red line three is that only people Sturgeon approves can ever be allowed to run the SNP

That is before Salmond kicks off his court case, a court case which is actively designed to surface the maximum amount of damaging information about Nicola Sturgeon and her cronies. I don’t believe there is any way Sturgeon can extricate herself from this web of scandal. There remains a (pauses, thinks about life in Barlinnie) ‘not zero chance’ she is going to be charged and tried.

You ought to know this stuff. What you may not know (I didn’t) is the extent to which Sturgeon still tries to shape the SNP to her own ends. To protect my unimpeachable sources I won’t go int detail here but she retains a network of hyper-loyalists in key positions in the party and in government and she is continuing to use them to pursue her own interests.

She has a set of red lines. Red line number one is that whatever she considers to be her ‘legacy’ must be preserved. If you have to means test something it would be better to means test baby boxes than winter fuel payments, but that leaves Sturgeon with even less for her CV.

Red line two is that nothing but nothing must be blamed on her. If a current Cabinet Secretary must be humiliated on TV because of decisions she made, the only unacceptable act is to pass the blame onto her.

Red line three is that only people Sturgeon approves can ever be allowed to run the SNP. That is primarily an extension of red line two because any sane leader would find a very big bus and vigorously deposit Sturgeon’s political corpse under it at the first available opportunity.

She phones Patrick Harvie to (unsuccessfully) beg him not to force Humza Youaf to do a deal with Alba so she persuades his Chief of Staff to stab him in the back on her behalf. These are acts of weakness, not strength, but they still do real damage to the party. After all, it was her people who rigged the election to get Yousaf the job in the first place.

I’m told reliably that this stuff is happening continually. No doubt pressure will be being placed on HQ staff to control who gets selected as a candidate for the 2026 election with the same criteria as above. That is literally the worst thing the SNP could do.

Yet despite the fact that there is a significant chance of jail time for at least one of the team who ran the party for a decade, despite the reality that the material that will do the biggest damage will trickle out in day after day of prosecution evidence to court and in comments from witnesses grilled about this, still she remains a party member and still she retains the whip like absolutely no other person in the SNP ever has in a similar position.

The ongoing presence of Nicola Sturgeon on our political scene is enduringly damaging to the reputation of Scotland generally but particularly to the SNP and the cause of independence

So let’s have a look at how this drags us all down. I bet some of you are rushing through defences in your head, reverting back to legal fig leafs like ‘innocent until proven guilty’. Some may even think they can get away with deploying those defences.

Of course that’s what Starmer thought – if I just fill in the right forms how could anyone object to me taking tens of thousands of money in personal gifts? There is no way the public could possibly object and see me as grubby, grasping and corrupt.

For the sake of argument to demonstrate the risk and not seeking to preempt the trial in any way, picture Peter Murrell being found guilty and carted off to prison for a long jail sentence, and then picture John Swinney on the early evening news.

"Mr Swinney, the Treasurer of your party and half of the members of the Finance and Audit Committee resigned and reported red flags over what was happening with the party accounts. Despite their legal right to see all the information they needed to carry out their responsibilities, this information was withheld. Now someone is in prison. You were the second most senior member of the party and of government for much of this time. What did you do?"

Obviously we know he did nothing. So its an easy follow up with "Well aren’t you morally culpable for what has happened here? Why should the public ever trust someone so willing to look the other way when allegations of corruption are made? If you won’t act on warnings of corruption from your own colleagues, what makes you fit to be First Minister?" I can go on like this for hours if you want.

Oh, and Branchform still isn’t the most dangerous or damaging thing for the SNP or the Scottish Government. If/when what I guess we must call ‘the Salmond Business’ starts to unravel, it is very much more damaging again.

Nicola Sturgeon is using the SNP as a kind of human shield to protect her from a faster reckoning with her actions. It is doing great damage to the SNP and it is going to do more. I repeat, if reading about £100,000 payments to shell companies that don’t seem to exist is making you uncomfortable as an SNP member or independence supporter, try and picture what the trial will be like.

The ongoing presence of Nicola Sturgeon on our political scene is enduringly damaging to the reputation of Scotland generally but particularly to the SNP and the cause of independence. She should be suspended forthwith and have the whip removed and it is way past time that the others who facilitated her should have been removed from office as well.

I don’t want to write about any of this any more. If this was just the downfall of one woman it wouldn’t interest me. But if she is bringing important things down with her, her fingers must be prized from those things or an even greater price will be paid.

Source: The SNP must get rid of Sturgeon