In any other household, if a man came home with an I-Pace Jaguar costing more than £81,277, his wife might immediately express pleasure, but then ask obvious questions. “How much did it cost? And where on earth did you get the money from?”
And what would any normal person think if their partner furnished the kitchen with a series of very expensive coffee machines every few months – worth £1,299, £1,865 and then £2,595, along with a £660 machine for warming coffee cups?
Yet, when Peter Murrell brought home such luxuries, his wife Nicola Sturgeon would have us believe she had no suspicions at all.
Sturgeon and Murrell were the so-called “power couple of Scottish politics”. They married in 2010 and lived together for 15 years until separating last year. They worked side-by-side as well: she from 2014 to 2023 as leader of the Scottish National Party [SNP] and Scottish First Minister, overlapping with Murrell’s years as chief executive of the SNP from 2001 to 2023.
After Peter Murrell pleaded guilty in court yesterday to embezzling more than £400,000 from the SNP over a period of 12 years to pay for such luxuries, Sturgeon said: “I had no knowledge or suspicion whatsoever that he was using SNP funds for personal purposes.”
Frankly, I doubt many Scots believe Sturgeon didn’t suspect a thing, and nor do I. Did Sturgeon ask him where the money came from to buy such lavish items?
We may never know if Sturgeon asked Murrell such questions, and how he might have responded, as she says she’s suffering “a profound personal trauma” and “will be making no further comment”.Her blank refusal to say more about her side of this astonishing story will do nothing to restore the shredded reputation of a woman who not long ago was the most respected politician in Britain.
It’s a pity. I’d like a tough broadcaster to press the former first minister on whether she really was so gullible to have no suspicions at all. Was she given the jewellery and cosmetics Murrell bought with SNP money, or were they destined for someone else? And if they were given to Sturgeon, what has she done with them?
Sadly, we may not learn much more about this extraordinary scandal. Murrell’s decision to change his plea to guilty may have saved the Scottish state huge sums in legal and court costs, and saved Sturgeon much embarrassment, but it deprives the public of the full truth. Voters won’t now hear from witnesses about how Murrell got away with his embezzlement for so long, or hear accounts of tough Scottish KCs, grilling Murrell and his many SNP colleagues, and perhaps Sturgeon too. And lessons won’t be learnt.
Who in the SNP knew or suspected Murrell was stealing party funds on a huge scale? Who in the party high command, or the Scottish Government tried to raise any suspicions? More telling, who tried to block discussion about the missing funds?
The former SNP MP Joanna Cherry, who is also a KC, deliberately secured election to the SNP executive committee in 2020 to raise questions about what had happened to £600,000 which had been raised to fight a second referendum campaign. She and several colleagues were met with denials and vituperation. “Nicola and her husband ran the party with a rod of iron,” Cherry told the BBC yesterday. “Anyone who asked questions was vilified as a traitor to the party, marginalised, bullied and intimidated… Why did she [Sturgeon] prevent those of us who are asking questions about the party’s finances from getting any answers?”
Joanna Cherry rightly wants a public inquiry into what happened and the serious failings in the SNP governance processes. One obvious lesson is that power should never again be concentrated on one married couple. Sturgeon’s predecessor, the late Alex Salmond, said before his own death in 2024 he’d warned Sturgeon about that concentration of power many years ago.
But bad governance is not just an SNP problem. Most of our political parties have dreadful processes which only encourage wrongdoing. Both Reform and the Greens, for example, are hopeless at vetting candidates, as we’ve seen in the current Makerfield by-election.
Labour is currently embroiled in a criminal court case where four people are accused of wide-scale fraud in a candidate selection in Croydon in 2023. All four deny the charges. Recently, a second alleged plot was exposed to run bogus independent candidates in the local elections in Tameside to draw votes away from Labour’s strongest challengers. (Labour has denied the accusations, reporting what it describes as “misinformation” to the police and Electoral Commission.)
Even the Lib Dems aren’t immune. The party faces a bill of around £250,000 in damages and costs after a London court recently declared the Lib Dems had broken equalities law several times over for deselecting a parliamentary candidate because of his strong Christian views.
The word “governance” sums it up. Voters have every right to assume that if our political parties don’t have strong internal governance, and can’t run their own operations honestly and competently, then how on earth can they govern the country effectively and with integrity?
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