Politics

And so the Nicola Sturgeon years end with neither a bang or a whimper but with one pitiful desk-clearing after another. Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s husband and the chief executive of the SNP, has announced his resignation. It comes after Murray Foote, the party’s chief spin doctor, walked on Friday. He had been rubbishing media reports that the party’s membership rolls had shrunk by 30,000 since 2021.  Then, Ash Regan, a candidate in the leadership contest to replace Sturgeon, questioned the integrity of that process and demanded the membership numbers be made public. Backed into a corner, SNP HQ released the figures, which showed a drop in members of 32,000 over

First, it was Nicola Sturgeon. Now her husband Peter Murrell has resigned as SNP chief executive after a scandal about covering up a fall in party membership numbers. He quit after being told that unless he did so by midday he’d face a confidence vote. That this happened on a Saturday lunchtime shows the disarray now engulfing the SNP hierarchy. It started yesterday when Murray Foote resigned as SNP parliamentary communications director. He said he had been misled (perhaps by Murrell himself) when he rubbished reports – calling them ‘drivel’ – that SNP membership had slid from 103,884 to 72,186 amidst frustrations about Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill. If Foote

‘Are you Jewish?’ the officious-looking Dutch diplomat asked my dad. ‘Yes’, he said, realising at that very moment, everything had changed. He was no longer Polish; the culture he had been born in, the citizenship he held, the language he spoke, the country he loved – it all meant nothing. He was just Jewish. He couldn’t be both. The diplomat stamped my father’s papers and he left for a new life in western Europe. Up to 20,000 Jews, including my mother, were hounded from Poland at the end of the 1960s. They were accused of supporting Israel in a virulent anti-Semitic campaign led by the communist government. This anti-Jewish campaign