Up here, north of the Border in Bonnie Scotland, it’s hard to get away from the wall-to-wall coverage in the media of the Murrell/Sturgeon scandal.
When the news came that Peter Murrell, former CEO of the Scottish National Party (SNP), had pleaded guilty to embezzling £400,000 of the party’s money between 2010 and 2022, the gasps across the country were almost audible.
How could he have been doing this over a 12-year period without anyone noticing – including his wife, leader of the party between 2014 and 2023 and First Minister (FM) of Scotland over the same period?
Speculation runs rife, of course, but now that Murrell has admitted his guilt, there will be no trial, and many of the juicier details that could have emerged during the interrogation of him and witnesses will remain hidden, at least for the time being.
Already, there are calls for a full public inquiry into the fiasco plus repayment of the money to party donors, but so far, the current FM, John Swinney’s, comments have been along the lines of “nothing further to see here, move along”.
I don’t think that stance can last very long. You can read elsewhere about the long list of items purchased by Murrell using his purloined money, so I won’t attempt to list any of it here.
What I will say, though, is – and you’ll have heard the phrase “the banality of evil” in relation to a much darker episode in human history – that the items illegally bought made me think of “the banality of corruption”, in this case anyway.
Pepper mills, mid-range cars, coffee machines and so on speak volumes of a basically empty life. Had there been a Peploe or a Cadell on the list, well, maybe I could understand better.
Murrell will be sentenced on June 23rd and looks likely to be facing a lengthy sojourn in jail, but you never know. Corruption, not just financial but also moral, ethical, and spiritual, has had a grip on Scottish social life for so long now that nothing is guaranteed.
The tentacles of the SNP are everywhere in the public service and charity worlds, where the patronage of the ruling party decides who gets the top jobs and the best funding. It was the same under other, non-SNP, administrations, to be fair.
I applied for the job at the heart of Peter Murrell's embezzlement scandal. This was the salary | Getty Images
Sadly, I don’t see this culture of nepotism and cronyism in the Scottish body politic ending any time soon. If perhaps Murrell’s self-confessed crimes had been exposed before the Scottish parliamentary elections on May 7th, as they would have done under initial trial planning, then we could very possibly have had a different result in Holyrood, but we will never know.
We can only hope that the newer parties now represented there will have a disruptive effect on the cosy consensus that has plagued the institution up until now.
As a footnote to the whole Murrell affair, a personal anecdote. When long-serving SNP CEO Mike Russell stood down from the role in 2001, I was an SNP member and applied for the job, which offered a salary of, if I remember correctly, circa £36,000 per annum, which was about half my previous military remuneration.
Yes, I was young and foolish and needed the money, having just resigned my army commission and with mouths to feed, a large-ish mortgage to pay, and my children in private education.
I also naively thought that the restoration of the Scottish parliament would be the beginning of a new, modern Scottish renaissance, and I wanted to be part of it. How wrong I was!
I was unsuccessful, and Murrell was appointed, but who knows how it could have turned out if things had gone differently? But, in retrospect, I think I dodged a bullet here. Be careful what you wish for...