Nicola Sturgeon – progressive icon, feminist champion, scourge of corrupt Tories – is, almost by definition, incapable of wrongdoing. As she insisted after her arrest on Sunday: ‘I know beyond doubt that I am in fact innocent of any wrongdoing.’ It is her truth. Her MSPs agree and have, we’re told, sent her flowers to soothe her distress at this injustice.
It was therefore something of an inconvenience that Police Scotland noted in their press statement on Sunday that the former FM had been ‘arrested as a suspect’ in their investigation into the funds and fundraising of the Scottish National Party. She was released seven hours later without charge and with the police reminding reporters and social media sleuths that this is an ongoing criminal investigation.
But it really didn’t sound good, did it? So the deputy leader of the SNP, Keith Brown, suggested that the police misspoke when they used the ‘a’ word. ‘It’s perhaps not well understood,’ he told the BBC, ‘that arrest is just a way of making sure that the interview and the information gathering by the police is put into a formal footing.’ It’s really just a quick chat. The police were probably just looking for guidance on the implementation of the First Minister’s hate crime bill.
Of course, Nicola Sturgeon is innocent until proven guilty, as her successor as First Minister, Humza Yousaf, insisted when he rejected calls to suspend her from the party whip to allow her the freedom to clear her name. This has long been standard practice in the SNP. Indeed, if any SNP politician had been ‘arrested as a suspect’ when Nicola Sturgeon was party leader they’d likely have been out of the door before you could say ‘presumption of innocence’. Her interpretation of the SNP code of conduct was that anyone who incurred the slightest hint of legal difficulties, let alone being arrested, had to be removed tout de suite in order to avoid bringing the party into disrepute.
Michelle Thomson, when she was an SNP MP, found herself defenestrated with extreme prejudice eight years ago after her solicitor was struck off for professional misconduct. Thomson’s company was investigated but she was never arrested as a suspect of anything. Nevertheless, the former executive of Business for Scotland was suspended from the party and ended up sitting as an independent. Earlier this week, Ms Thomson suggested that Nicola Sturgeon should follow her own rulebook now and ‘resign the SNP whip’.
Yet Mr Brown stepped in again to deny this precedent. He insisted that Ms Thomson had voluntarily resigned. ‘The public record said that Michelle Thomson took the decision to withdraw from the whip in the Westminster group,’ he told BBC Scotland. Ms Thomson shot back at her deputy leader, calling his account ‘categorically untrue’ – and to be fair, she should know.
Brown’s attempt to rewrite history was distinctly Orwellian, as was his attempt to deodorise Police Scotland’s account of Nicola Sturgeon’s arrest. Now, of course, the fact that the former FM was arrested does not mean she has done anything wrong – or indeed that she has not done anything wrong. Indeed, Mr Brown’s intervention is just the kind of spin that the Crown Office tells journalists to avoid.
We are told never to comment on guilt or innocence but confine ourselves strictly to the facts. And the facts, as the former general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation Calum Steele pointed out, are that under the 2016 Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act, ‘a constable may arrest a person without a warrant if the constable has reasonable grounds for suspecting that the person has committed or is committing an offence’. Enough said.
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