Nicola Sturgeon is not a victim of theft and fraud. This mere truism bears stressing. In her BBC interview with Laura Kuenssberg this morning, the former Scottish first minister remarkably depicted herself as a wronged party. The crimes of her estranged husband, Peter Murrell, had – you see – put her “into a position of real peril” and subjected her “to public vilification”.
This tearful performance was frustrating for viewers, as it failed to elicit hard information. For Sturgeon herself, it was disastrous. She came across as evasive, self-pitying and reflexively impenitent. She was unintentionally revealing when insisting that, as it was her husband rather than herself who had embezzled £400,000, she owed no apology. She demonstrated thereby a lamentable failure to grasp the public significance of the scandal.
First, even supposing Murrell had been a figure of integrity, it was always dubious that a married couple should hold the posts respectively of leader and chief executive of the governing party in the Scottish Parliament. Second, it was in her capacity as SNP leader, not as the unwitting spouse of a crook, that Sturgeon stymied the financial scrutiny that would have exposed Murrell’s crimes much earlier.
At a meeting (held virtually, during the pandemic) of the SNP’s ruling national executive committee in March 2021, Sturgeon said: “There are no reasons for people to be concerned about the party’s finances and all of us need to be careful about not suggesting that there is.”
That’s the accusation against Sturgeon; and the interview yielded no refutation. We also know she resolutely answered “no comment” in response to police inquiries. Yet, the demands of accountability remain even for politicians who are guilty of no crime. Voters are owed answers: what did the former first minister know, and when did she know it?
At times, Sturgeon appeared to have taken tips on interview technique from Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. She ventured that she did not “have any conscious memory of seeing that motorhome”, as the vehicle bought with stolen funds by her husband was “not immediately visible” when visiting her in-laws, with whom it was parked.
This is risible. There can be no recovery in her personal or political reputation.
Alongside the questions for SNP leaders that remain unanswered, there is the wider conundrum of how the scandal will affect the party’s fortunes and the cause of Scottish independence. Conceivably there will be no visible electoral impact at all.
Since emerging as the largest party in elections to the Scottish Parliament in 2007, the SNP has become not merely dominant but near-monolithic in the politics of Scotland. It weathered scandals surrounding Alex Salmond, Sturgeon’s predecessor and mentor. It may do so again.
You can see how this would play out. John Swinney, Sturgeon’s successor as SNP leader and first minister, maintains vigorously, if implausibly, that it is the party rather than the public that has suffered from Murrell’s larceny. The Labour Government in Westminster is fractious and unpopular. The rise of Reform is widely seen as an expression of English nationalism, whereas Scotland did not vote for the quixotic cause of Brexit.
But the travails of the SNP probably have set back the cause of independence for a long time. The Yes campaign in the 2014 referendum foundered on an inability to answer basic questions of governance: above all, what currency would an independent Scotland adopt?
Voters still don’t know, as the SNP is understandably reluctant to acknowledge the costs and trade-offs in breaking a successful currency union. Now, there are tangible reasons why its leaders are owed no trust even on probity, let alone momentous issues of Scotland’s financial, economic and diplomatic future.
