With police surrounding the home of Nicola Sturgeon, and the arrest of her husband yesterday, the people of Scotland need answers – and fast.
For once, Humza Yousaf was only telling it like it is. ‘This has been a difficult day for the party,’ he said, after the former Chief Executive of the SNP, Peter Murrell, the husband of the former SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, was arrested by police in Glasgow. He was released without charge almost 12 hours later pending further investigations.
As for the Scottish National party, as it staggers from crisis to crisis, long suffering members must wonder if things will ever be the same again.
It’s a difficult time for the new First Minister too. Yousaf insists he had no prior knowledge of the police’s actions and that he knows no more than the rest of us about the arrest of the man who has been a key figure in SNP HQ for over 20 years. Mind you, the FM must also be thankful that the police decided to swoop after, rather than during, the fraught leadership campaign that he won so narrowly. Questions will inevitably be raised about the timing of recent events.
But Scotland has become a very strange place two months after Nicola Sturgeon resigned as leader. The Murrell’s family home was turned into what looked like a Blue Lights crime scene as the police erected an investigation tent in the former First Minister’s front garden. There were ten officers and six marked police cars at one stage. What were they expecting? A riot?
Helpfully constables reportedly emptied the Murrell’s bins for them. Officers were also seen, apparently, with spades in Murrell’s back garden. The optics, as we like to say in the media, were appalling. And who knows what the neighbours thought. Police had also been stationed outside SNP headquarters in Edinburgh, before commencing a raid of Gordon Lamb House.
It is now a potent issue of national concern that the police seem to be increasingly involved in SNP politics. It is almost exactly three years since Alex Salmond, the former first minister, was arrested and charged with 13 counts of sexual harassment and attempted rape. He was acquitted of all charges in March 2020 after a sensational 11-week trial.
Yesterday, reporters were eager to hear what the former leader had to say about the arrest of Peter Murrell, the man he had accused, in the televised Holyrood inquiry into the botched harassment inquiry, of conducting a plot to have him imprisoned. Salmond would not comment on the specifics of Mr Murrell’s arrest. All he would say is that ‘I led the SNP for a long time, so I’m very sad about what’s happened, and indeed about what it’s become.’
Twitter’s normally voluble accounts have been stifled by the laws on contempt. It is dangerous in today’s Scotland even to mention facts that are already in the public domain. No one wants to end up in jail and Scotland is now a land where journalists can be imprisoned for speculation. The nationalist blogger, Craig Murray, was imprisoned last year after he published material that the Crown Office believed could lead to the identification of some of Alex Salmond’s accusers. Other journalists have been hassled and investigated.
All we can safely report is what the police said yesterday that Peter Murrell was taken into custody for questioning ‘as a suspect’, that the investigation is ongoing and that a report will likely be going to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal service in due course. It is also a matter of record that, for the last two years, the SNP has been under police investigation for possible irregularities in party finances under the Operation Branchform.
Nicola Sturgeon has not commented on the arrest but she has, this morning, pulled out of an Edinburgh Science Festival event she was to be leading with the Mexican diplomat Patricia Espinosa. Humza Yousaf has denied on her behalf that the arrest of Peter Murrell was the ‘real reason’ why she resigned as First Minister. At her farewell press conference two months ago she was asked whether the police investigation had anything to do with her sudden departure from office. She insisted that it had nothing to do with it. She just didn’t have enough left in the tank.
But can any power couple in history have suffered such an extraordinary reversal of fortune in such a short space of time? Until February, Nicola Sturgeon appeared to be at the top of her game. Under her leadership the SNP had won eight elections straight and dominated Scottish politics as every level. The opposition parties posed no threat to her and there was not internal rivals to worry about. Then, suddenly, she was gone. Then, three weeks ago, her husband Peter Murrell resigned as chief executive following the release to the media of false membership figures.
They could be forgiven for thinking the gods had it in for them. As for the Scottish National party, as it staggers from crisis to crisis, long suffering members must wonder if things will ever be the same again. As the psephologist Professor John Curtice remarked on TV, these images cannot easily be erased from the public mind. The new leader Humza Yousaf has enjoyed no honeymoon bounce in the opinion polls. For the Scottish National party, the only way is down.
