Nicola Sturgeon’s arrest was inevitable

There was an air of inevitability about the arrest today of Nicola Sturgeon. The SNP had been braced for it. But that doesn’t make the sight of the former first minister of Scotland being taken into police custody any less extraordinary and, to many SNP observers, any more justified.

Hadn’t her successor in Bute House, Humza Yousaf, said only recently that: ‘We are past the time of judging a woman on what happens to her husband’. Well, no one seems to have told Police Scotland. Ms Sturgeon’s arrest follows the taking into custody two months ago of her husband, the party’s chief executive, Peter Murrell. After being questioned by detectives, Sturgeon was released this evening without charge, in what the police describe as a continuing investigation.

In April, following the arrest of the National Treasurer, Colin Beattie, a number of SNP insiders had forecast that ‘Nicola will be next’. She is the only senior SNP official named on the party’s most recent financial accounts who had not been arrested under Operation Branchform into the finances of the Scottish National Party.