Scottish politics has never been more febrile. If we go a day without an arrest, a resignation, a revelation about financial mismanagement in the Scottish National Party we wonder what we’ve missed. It’s probably a little like this after a coup or in a failing Latin American state. Okay, there are no tanks rumbling along Sauchiehall St., but the political and media worlds have been holding their collective breath waiting to see if the former First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, will be arrested by police. Newspapers have their profiles ready to run. So far she has avoided the long hand of the law.
Why is everyone expecting this hitherto blameless politician, this icon of progressive feminism, to be taken into police custody? Well, Sturgeon’s is the third name on the SNP’s now infamous 2020/21 financial accounts along with her husband, then party chief executive Peter Murrell, and the then National Treasurer, Colin Beattie. They have both been arrested by police and released without charge. The investigation into party finances is ongoing, say the police. It stands to reason that Nicola Sturgeon will be next.
Why is everyone expecting this hitherto blameless politician, this icon of progressive feminism, to be taken into police custody?
Ministers and SNP insiders are privately incandescent about this demolition job on their former leader’s political image and about the train of damaging events that risks wrecking the political fortunes of the party. The latest Times/YouGov poll suggests that the SNP’s lead over Labour for Holyrood elections has been halved in a month, from 17 to 8 points. Many in the party are relieved it isn’t worse. The SNP’s new First Minister, Humza Yousaf, has seen his popularity – never high – tank. He has an approval rating of minus 25 – only two points ahead of the Tory leader, Rishi Sunak’s popularity in Scotland.
Yousaf’s policy ‘reset’ this week was supposed to draw a line under the ever deepening financial scandal. He has shelved troubled policies like the bottle return scheme, the ban on alcohol advertising and the National Care Service. However, only 19 per cent think he is doing a ‘good job’ according to YouGov. Nearly half think he is a ‘weak’ leader.
Humza Yousaf’s political honeymoon turned into a baptism of fire. On the very day that he was to deliver his first major policy speech as First Minister on Tuesday, the SNP’s National Treasurer, Colin Beattie, was arrested by police. A former banker who had been SNP treasurer for most of the last 20 years, Beattie was allowed to return to his Dalkeith home later that day with no charge. But the damage was done. The policy speech became a sidebar to the latest twist in the financial tale.
Mr Yousaf didn’t help himself. ‘Of course I’m surprised when a colleague is arrested’ he volunteered to reporters outside the Holyrood debating chamber on Tuesday morning. He topped that zinger by denying that the SNP was behaving in a ‘criminal way’. Everyone in the SNP had been avoiding the ‘c’ word and now it’s all over the press. Humza Yousaf was made to sound like a Mafia suspect taking the fifth.
Desperate to avoid a clear out of party headquarters he insisted that Mr Beattie should not be suspended from the party, just as he had refused to suspend the former chief executive, Peter Murrell after he was arrested. This was a break with standard SNP practice in which anyone who has the slightest brush with the law gets instantly suspended ‘so that they can clear their names’. Apparently this was not necessary in Mr Beattie’s case, or Mr Murrell’s – or indeed Nicola Sturgeon’s. Opposition politicians insisted that, as the Third Woman, she should be put on the naughty step for a while. Some 43 per cent of Scottish voters agree she should be suspended, according to YouGov.
Mr Beattie, the SNP MSP for Midlothian North and Musselburgh accepted the inevitable and resigned from Holyrood’s Public Audit Committee. It would have looked distinctly odd for him to continue to have a role in validating the accounts of the Scottish administration when his own party’s were in such a mess. Mr Beattie also resigned as SNP treasurer, but this landed hapless Humza in another pickle. As party leader, he had to take on the role of SNP treasurer pro tem – a chalice so poisoned that merely to mention it is to be contaminated.
It has to be said we are still none the wiser what all this police activity is really all about. All we can do is repeat, ad nauseam, that Operation Branchform began two years ago after outsiders complained that they were not being told how a £660k fund ‘ring fenced’ for an independence referendum had been spent. In 2021, the then SNP National Treasurer, Douglas Chapman, who had briefly taken over from Colin Beattie, resigned saying he was not being given the information necessary for him to conduct his ‘fiduciary duty’.
It later emerged that the SNP’s auditors, Johnston Carmichael, had resigned six months ago, and that no accounting firm had been found to take over the party accounts which have to be finalised by July. Mr Murrell was also discovered to have loaned the SNP £107,000 of his own money. Oh, and a £110,000 luxury motorhome was seized by police from the driveway of Mr Murrell’s mother’s home.
Somehow an internal auditing issue has morphed into a full blown criminal investigation. Two weeks ago, police erected a forensic tent outside Sturgeon’s Uddingston home, like something out of Line of Duty, and arrested her husband, party chief executive Peter Murrell. SNP headquarters in Edinburgh was also raided and boxes of evidence removed under the gaze of the TV cameras.
There is a deal of sympathy within the independence movement for Nicola Sturgeon’s plight – and not just from conspiracy theorists who think it’s an MI5 plot. Even some of her sternest critics think she is hard done by. She has always appeared the consummate politician, a progressive democrat, who wouldn’t know how to fiddle accounts even if she wanted to. But the legacy of financial mismanagement in the party now threatens to destroy her own possible future career as an international human rights advocate. And Humza ‘Useless’, as he is now widely known, risks having his existing career cut brutally short.
Comments