The first thing to say is that Nicola Sturgeon has been cleared in an investigation into the SNP’s funding and finances, with no case to answer, scot-free. That may seem a statement of the bleedin’ obvious, but there are many in and out of the independence movement who do not and never will believe that she is wholly innocent.
No smoke without fire. Who was it that set up the £600,000 fund in 2017 for a referendum campaign that never happened? Are you trying to tell me that this micromanaging, control-freak politician was ignorant of what has been alleged to have gone on in her party under her very nose?
Salmond and Sturgeon were, in different ways, casualties of the times in which we live
Yes, people will inevitably cling to their suspicions. But to repeat, Nicola Sturgeon has been cleared of any wrongdoing – perhaps not in court, but by the police and the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, after over two full years of investigation. As she said herself, she has ‘done nothing wrong’.
People are wrong to try Nicola Sturgeon in absentia – mainly on social media, just as people were wrong to retry Alex Salmond after he was acquitted of all charges of sexual misconduct by a High Court jury in 2020. Then, many of his detractors said: no smoke without fire. How could nine women be lying? Thick jury didn’t understand the law. That was unfair and unjust, and trying to do the same to Sturgeon is no better. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Of course, people will continue to hold their suspicions of the former First Minister. But I have no hesitation in saying, as someone who knew her for nearly thirty years, that I never suspected she had her fingers in the till. It just wasn’t in character.
Nationalists of her generation really weren’t interested in pecuniary gain. They were in politics because of their passionate belief in independence and their sense of historic grievance. Belief is much more powerful than money.
One of the problems we have had trying to report and comment on Operation Branchform over the last three years is that the Crown Office and police threatened hellfire and damnation to anyone who said a peep about the case, or cases. We couldn’t, and still can’t, say what we know.
Yet salacious tidbits were somehow leaked to tabloid newspapers. Where did all that intelligence come from?
It is not ‘speculation’ about guilt or innocence to say that Police Scotland and the prosecutors face legitimate questions over just how long this case has been running and how it became, like it or not, a political issue. How could they not realise that maintaining this cloud of suspicion over leading nationalist politicians would damage their cause, their party, their government? I say this as someone who has been no apologist for Nicola Sturgeon, as anyone who reads my pieces will know.
As Sir John Curtice, our leading pollster, has pointed out repeatedly, Operation Branchform seriously damaged the image and electability of the Scottish National party. No, it is not the reason they lost 37 seats in the July 2024 general election. That was more about policies like transgender self-ID, the coalition of chaos with the Scottish Green party, heat pumps, ferries, waiting lists… you name it. But Operation Branchform, the three-year investigation into allegations of misuse of party funds, was electoral kryptonite for the party.
Indeed, one of the great counterfactuals of Scottish politics is what might have happened, or not happened, if Nicola Sturgeon had not resigned precipitately in February 2023. Most people forget that she stood down as First Minister long before she was arrested by police. Many voters seem to think that this was tantamount to an admission of guilt. It clearly was not.
I’m sure a defence lawyer would have advised her, if she had sought one out, to sit tight as head of the government. I mean, the police would think twice about arresting the First Minister of Scotland. Would they have kept dragging the First Minister in for questioning when she was running the country? What would the Scottish government’s legal division have said about allowing this matter to drag on endlessly, to the detriment of a government, and a First Minister, elected by the democratic will of the people of Scotland?
But that is all for historians to ponder over. All we know is that the two most significant figures in Scottish politics of the last quarter-century, Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon, came to grief over criminal accusations and lengthy police investigations about matters of which they were innocent.
Conspiracy theorists abound in the independence movement, and no doubt some of them will think that this was, in some devious way, willed by the Westminster establishment to prevent the breakup of Britain. I mean, it couldnae just be coincidence, could it? We’re no’ buttoned up the back. Surely there was unionist collusion here.
But they are wrong. Salmond and Sturgeon were, in different ways, casualties of the times in which we live – times in which politicians are universally suspected of wrongdoing, even when they have done nothing wrong, and in which politics and policing have become dangerously entangled. It happened to Boris Johnson over partygate, it is happening to Keir Starmer over gifts and two-tier policing. It has now become almost routine for senior politicians to find themselves under suspicion for something or other.
I’m not saying that politicians should not be held to account. But we get the politicians we deserve. Many able people are deterred from entering politics at senior levels precisely because they don’t want to end up like Nicola Sturgeon: under a two-year cloud of suspicion that has damaged her career even as she is exonerated. International bodies like the EU or the UN considering the former FM, an international celebrity in her day, for a prominent human rights post will just look on Google, see the word ’embezzlement’ and think: perhaps she’s not quite what we’re looking for, after all.
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