Historians may yet conclude that hers was one defining tragedy: that Nicola Sturgeon spent far too much time in her last job – the trifling matter of running Scotland – thinking about her next one. She trotted eagerly after the clattering Blahniks of Mary Robinson, Madeleine Albright, and, so help us, Liz Truss onto the global lecture circuit. Some vague, blobby role with the United Nations? Or an untasking part in international charity? The exacting round of gala luncheons, champagne receptions, Davos drinks and nibbles, mwah-mwah with the likes of Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, the Duchess of Sussex; the odd private viewing at the Uffizi? Such hopes, after today, are but dust and ashes.
Miss Sturgeon is, of course, wholly innocent of her ex-husband’s crimes. Indeed, she – though not nearly as much as the Scottish National Party – is a victim too, though her paean of pain might have punched more effectively had her initial response been in four sentences rather than four paragraphs. But should she not have been worried? How on earth did she never suspect?
As full details of Murrell’s spending spree emerged on Monday, we reeled from a catalogue of consumption worthy of a Viv Nicholson, an Imelda Marcos, a Duchess of York. Murrell spent money on game consoles and games, including Grand Theft Auto. He had also purchased a now infamous motor-home using SNP funds. Murrell blew thousands of SNP funds on game consoles alone. Still more on, for instance, wireless headphones, an electric toothbrush, garden border-edging, and – in November 2019 - £299.50 on tooth-achingly sweet, cheap chocolate.
You might just overlook the thousands spent on a single fountain pen: how do you forget five tubs of Quality Street? The bottles of fine whisky. The jewellery, the car, the infamous motor-home, untold luxury goods, items of men and women’s clothing, costly jewellery - and the missus never noticed a thing? On the scale between leaving the cap off the toothpaste tube and someone else’s bra tumbling from a weekend suitcase, as much as an unexplained T-shirt would normally invite a serious ‘domestic’.
The one winner, sort of, in this extraordinary scandal was not spared to see its denouement: back in 2014, Alex Salmond forcefully advised Sturgeon that, on assuming the SNP leadership, keeping her man in place as its salaried Chief Executive was not a good idea. Such counsel was not, we can safely assume, counted to her predecessor for righteousness; and much might have followed from that alone.
Peter Murrell is not essentially a wicked man. Embezzlers seldom are. It starts with a wee bit of borrowing. With every intention of paying it back. Then just a little more, as you rationalise it. And then, one day, it dawns on you there is no way back – and no way out. And, just like that, Murrell was suddenly Macbeth. ‘I am in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er…’
But this was far more than greed. Or grand larceny. It was a gross betrayal of trust, at the most personal level. I was myself active in the SNP 40 years ago. At the fringe of a happy little band of brothers – John Swinney, Kevin Pringle, Peter Murrell – who, in that era, could not conceivably have been accused of being in politics for ambition or the money. Murrell was much beloved. ‘Muddle,’ Swinney would affectionately call him, casually rubbing his round little head. To a wider circle – and aptly – he was ‘Penfold,’ after that blinking little personality in Danger Mouse.
How did such fellowship and innocence come to this? How did it take so long for anyone to notice, or to dare to act? How did this grubby little grasper, filling his boots, get to sit for so long at Scotland’s top table – central to the Sturgeon kitchen-cabinet and among the three or four most powerful men in the country? And how, at the other end of that power, do all the little people feel? The schoolboys who have leafleted for the SNP for hours? Or the activists ‘lamp-posting’ along winding country roads? The redoubtable grandmothers raising funds for ‘Scotland’s cause’ in a host of church-hall endeavours – jumble-sales, carwashes, the St Andrew’s Day raffle and untold soup-and-pudding lunches? What has Sturgeon, our sometime self-styled ‘National Mammy,’ to say to them?
Murrell is going down; the Nationalists, presumably, will get at least the camper-van back. One doubts they let Quality Street into Barlinnie. But, in all, this is more than the squalid fall of a greedy little man: it is a veritable graveyard of reputations. And no one, atop the SNP, is entirely undefiled.
