Euan McColm

The imprisonment of former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell for embezzling more than £400,000 brings to the end an especially sordid chapter in the history of Scotland’s largest political party. Murrell – the estranged husband of former first minister Nicola Sturgeon – was led from the dock at the High Court in Edinburgh on Tuesday morning to begin a five-and-a-half-year sentence after admitting, last month, to rinsing the SNP’s accounts to splash out on enough luxury goods to start a department store. Once half of the most powerful couple in Scotland, Murrell is now just another inmate in our overcrowded prison estate, and all that tat he bought will be sold to pay back his party. But while the hearing ends Murrell’s part in this bizarre story, the drama continues.

The Scottish Conservative victory in the Aberdeen South by-election wasn’t entirely unexpected. New MP Douglas Lumsden is a well-known local figure who ran a savvy campaign pledging to fight for an oil and gas industry abandoned by the SNP. He was always thought to be in with a shout. The real surprise of the night was the scale of the SNP’s defeat. During the final days of campaigning, Tory sources were willing to admit they had a degree of optimism, but nothing more. This might just have kicked off a long-anticipated civil war in the SNP In the end, Lumsden – a former councillor and current member of the Scottish Parliament –took 50 per cent of the vote, beating the SNP’s Richard Thomson comfortably.

When SNP supporters who’d donated to a fund for a second independence referendum campaign began asking questions about where all the money was, their then-leader Nicola Sturgeon was not happy. Members of the party’s National Executive Committee – meeting virtually in March 2021 – were told that, contrary to damaging gossip, the party’s finances had never been stronger. The woman who once dreamed of leading Scotland to independence and, in doing so, taking her place among the giants of political history is now a national laughing stock Sturgeon, a politician who prefers to engage from the moral high-ground, left colleagues in no doubt that, as far as she was concerned, there was nothing further to discuss.

Susan Smith is a contemporary feminist heroine, a staunch defender of women’s rights against the increasingly unhinged demands of trans activists. As a founding member of the campaign group For Women Scotland (FWS), Smith was at the forefront of the fight against SNP plans to introduce self-ID. And, boy, was she effective. Along with her FWS colleagues Marion Calder and Trina Budge, Smith brought a case against the Scottish government which saw the supreme court rule in April that, when it comes to the law, sex is a matter of biology rather than feelings. That ruling, applicable across the UK, killed off the fantastical notion that trans-identifying men are women.

If you’d like to know whether the Labour MP Joani Reid is any good, canvass the opinions of some of her colleagues in the Commons. You’ll hear that the 39-year-old is, variously, too big for her boots, an attention seeker, and, of course, a right-wing Zionist stooge. More than one comrade will tell you she’s only an MP because of who her grandfather was. It doesn’t matter that the much-admired trade unionist Jimmy Reid died in 2010 or that he was a member of the SNP at the time. He just fixed it for her, right? That’s how it works. But Reid, the MP for East Kilbride and Strathaven (a seat she snatched back from the Scottish nationalists last year) is a very good parliamentarian indeed.

The first clue that Scottish Labour might not be dead in the water came with a soundtrack by Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars. Campaigning for the 2021 Holyrood Election, party leader Anas Sarwar joined an open-air dance class in the town of Livingston and – throwing all dignity to the wind – joined in. Then, just weeks into the job of leading what seemed to be a party in constant decline, Sarwar displayed some passable moves to the hit single 'Uptown Funk'. A clip of the scene quickly went viral. Young, energetic and likeable, Sarwar showed himself a good sport and that counted for a lot. Over the preceding years, as the SNP rose to political dominance at Holyrood, Scottish Labour politicians had grown accustomed to being treated with, at best, derision in the streets.

Anyone continuing to labour under the misapprehension that the Scottish Green party is primarily concerned with matters environmental should stop doing so, immediately. Yes, the Greens have long attracted those who hold standard left-wing views on issues from the economy to Palestine to gender ideology – but the raison d’être was always saving the planet, wasn’t it? No longer. Today, the Scottish Green party is, first and foremost, a trans rights organisation. Interviewed by Martin Geissler for a BBC Scotland Scotcast episode this week, recently-elected party co-leaders Ross Greer and Gillian Mackay made this abundantly clear. In fact, anybody who does not accept that trans women are women seems to have no place in their party.

When nurse Sandie Peggie complained about the presence of a trans-identifying man in the women’s changing room at Falkirk’s Victoria Hospital, she was treated as a dangerous bigot. A witch-hunt saw her suspended from the job to which she had devoted thirty years of her life and she faced horrifying allegations of placing patients in danger. Today, Peggie is not only a household name in Scotland, she’s fast becoming a national hero. An industrial tribunal called by the nurse – started in February, paused, then resumed last week – has heard how doctors and management turned on her while rallying round Dr Beth Upton, a man who claims to be a biological woman.

To mutilate the words of PG Wodehouse, it is never difficult to distinguish between a Scottish nationalist with a grievance and a ray of sunshine. Fury is the fuel that drives the SNP, which has been in power at the Scottish parliament for 18 years. So it is hardly a surprise that First Minister John Swinney has reacted angrily to the new deal struck between the United Kingdom and the European Union. The agreement reached between Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen will increase freedom of movement, create closer relationships between businesses, and increase cooperation on food standards. These are things that the SNP has been demanding ever since the UK voted, in 2016, to leave the EU.

The remarkable story of nurse Sandie Peggie, suspended from her job after she complained about the presence of a male doctor in a staff changing room, has what politicos describe as 'cut through'. Over the past week, a tribunal in Dundee has heard jaw-dropping evidence about how the nurse was treated when she questioned the presence of Dr Beth Upton, a trans woman, in a female-only space. Even BBC Scotland, normally decidedly squeamish about covering anything that might upset touchy trans activists, has carried daily reports on the case brought by Peggie against both her employers, NHS Fife, and Upton. To give you a flavour of proceedings so far, on Monday, Upton – a doctor, remember – said biological sex was a 'nebulous' term.

Quarterly reports from the office of National Records of Scotland confirm time and again the existence of an ongoing drug deaths crisis north of the border. And, time and again, the Scottish government reveals itself to be devoid of ideas for how to tackle it. Now, however, there has been a flicker of progress with the opening of the UK's first safe drug consumption room in Glasgow this week. But will it make any real difference to the national drugs death crisis? I have my doubts. Scotland has the highest rate of drug-related fatalities anywhere in Europe. And, despite repeated assurances from ministers that they recognise the problem, there is no sign of the situation getting any better.

Scotland's First Minister John Swinney began 2025 in the traditional manner – with a chorus of Auld Lang Syne. Speaking at Edinburgh University on Monday morning, Swinney called for unity across the political divide and urged opposition leaders to get behind his government’s budget. Failure to do so, said the FM, would 'feed the forces of anti-politics and of populism'. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, however, was in no mood to clasp hands with Swinney and sing along about bygones correctly placed. As the First Minister spoke in Edinburgh, Sarwar delivered his own state-of-the-nation address, 50 miles west at his alma mater, the University of Glasgow. While Swinney was reaching out, Sarwar was reciting a litany of SNP failures.

If there’s one thing the SNP truly excels at, it’s maintaining double standards. The extraordinary case of the Scottish government and the missing legal advice makes clear just how hypocritical the SNP is when it comes to conduct in public life. Scottish nationalists are swift to condemn opponents at the slightest whiff of impropriety but, as this matter demonstrates, when it comes to their own morality, they’re more easy-going. Back in 2021, then first minister Nicola Sturgeon was cleared of breaching the Scottish parliament’s ministerial code over her involvement in the case of complaints made by female civil servants against her predecessor, the late Alex Salmond.

If you need proof that the SNP’s modus operandi in government is to make it up on the hoof, consider the party’s plan for a National Care Service (NCS). Announced by former first minister Nicola Sturgeon, the NCS was to be a radical – even visionary – solution to growing pressure on both the National Health Service and the social care sector. By bringing sharp focus to the needs of a growing elderly population, the new care service would not only mean immediate improvements to the lives of those it was established to serve, it would also end the use of hospitals as unofficial care homes. The argument in favour of the creation of a dedicated care service are absolutely compelling. What a terrible shame, then, that the Scottish NCS is never going to become an actual thing.

Ten years ago today the Scottish independence referendum took place. The result was a resounding defeat for those who wanted Scotland to break away. The decade since has not been kind to the Scottish nationalist project. It all seemed very different for nationalists on the afternoon of Thursday September 18, 2014 Former SNP leader Alex Salmond, who led the independence campaign, looks a shadow of his former self. Last Saturday, Salmond was ignored by weary shoppers as he addressed a couple of hundred flag-waving supporters in Glasgow’s George Square; meanwhile, current party boss John Swinney gave an interview this week in which he suggested that the independence project's great hope was an 'independence generation' of young Scots.

Humiliation really does concentrate the political mind, doesn’t it? Over the years when the SNP dominated the Scottish parliamentary chamber, ministers spent little time reaching across party lines. Indeed, by the time Nicola Sturgeon was first minister in 2014, for every SNP MSP missing the point in Holyrood, there was another pointing and jeering at anyone who disagreed with them. In July, the SNP lost 39 of its 48 Westminster seats. Suddenly, cooperation and collaboration became the order of the day. Opposition politicians smell SNP blood First Minister John Swinney was the very model of the reasonable man as he announced the SNP’s ‘Programme for Government’ on Wednesday afternoon. To be fair to Swinney, he is not the instinctive combatant that Nicola Sturgeon was.

The Scottish government has today confirmed that it will follow Westminster's decision to end the universal payment of winter fuel payments to pensioners. Instead, a Holyrood-run alternative will ensure that those elderly Scots most in need are still supported through means-testing. Social justice secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville insists she is unhappy about the decision, stating today that she had 'no alternative but to replicate the decision' after Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced cuts in England. Somerville claims that the Chancellor’s decision to end universal entitlement for winter fuel payments means a cut of almost 90 per cent of the funding for the Scottish benefit. This sounds bleak, doesn’t it?