WATCHING A STACK of dominos collapsing on YouTube seemed a metaphor for what has been happening in Scotland recently.
On 23 February 2023, Sir Iain Livingstone announced he would resign from the post of Chief Constable of Police Scotland, two years before his current contract expires. This was in the wake of John Swinney’s budget which would, said Livingstone, create ‘hard choices’ for the police. Another factor may have been the complete unworkability of the Hate Crime Act with which Humza Yousaf had lumbered Police Scotland when he was Justice Minister. This came a year after the abrupt resignation of the second chief of the Scottish National Investment Bank in eighteen months (and still not replaced).
But the big one was the announcement on 15 February 2023 of the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon as Scottish First Minister. This was followed by the intimation by John Swinney that he would resign as Deputy First Minister. What has followed would have stumped Lady Bracknell: ‘to lose one parent…’.
The numbers of the SNP’s loss of officers are greater than her dictum encompasses, but the sentiment is appropriate. Yet perhaps ‘chaos’ is more fitting than ‘carelessness’ in the SNP’s case. After Sturgeon’s resignation and a short interval, the resignations came thick and fast: Liz Lloyd as Sturgeon’s special adviser, Murray Foote as the SNP’s Parliamentary Group’s communications head, and, the other big one, on 18 March and with immediate effect, Peter Murrell, the SNP’s long-serving chief executive and arguably the architect of its electoral successes.
The case of Murrell is intriguing, not least since we know so little about him that we might term him the eminence grise of the SNP. Beyond his birth date (08.12.64), and that he was educated in Edinburgh and Glasgow, that he worked in Alex Salmond’s Banff and Buchan constituency office, became SNP chief executive in 1999 and married Nicola Sturgeon in 2010, both his career details and private life are carefully guarded secrets. It has been alleged the reason for this lies in various injunctions invoked to safeguard his privacy. Perhaps one day an enterprising biographer will be able to give us the full account that is currently lacking.
There can be no doubt that Murrell has been the mastermind behind the organisation of the modern SNP as a tightly-disciplined and unquestioningly loyal band of separatist supporters, whose faith in both the secessionist project and the infallibility of the party leadership which would lead them to the promised land of a new Scottish state, was for long unflinching. It may be too much to say that Murrell has been Sturgeon’s Svengali, but the clear impression is that he has been the one who has fashioned SNP policy and tactics. He has certainly been one of the very few members of Sturgeon’s inner circle. He has also built up a core group of cadres who have dominated large-scale party propaganda activities. It is probably not too much to say that nothing has happened in the SNP without Murrell’s knowledge and acquiescence. That is why, in the end, he had to take responsibility for the lies that were told in public about the SNP’s membership figures.
That is what makes Ms Sturgeon’s claims, on 20 March 2023, that Murrell ‘did not intend to mislead’ over SNP membership numbers, echoing Murrell’s own claim, disingenuous. The ultra-professional party organiser Murrell knew, of course – and probably on a day-to-day basis, whatever he and Sturgeon may say – what was happening to the membership numbers. It is simply not credible to say otherwise.
Undoubtedly, Murrell’s expertise lay in party development, recruitment and electoral campaigning. These were the areas in which the SNP excelled. His dominance has been such that that is as far as the party has gone: the SNP has never been an accomplished governing party. The devolved areas for which Ms Sturgeon’s administration was responsible, as its sole remit, have gone to wrack and ruin during her period in office. When asked what she has achieved as first minister, her answer is, invariably, the baby box, an idea of limited utility and borrowed from another country (Finland). It is risible.
Under Murrell’s leadership, the SNP has been an agit prop campaigning party, and nothing more. No doubt Murrell had some input into the kinds of policy that an SNP government should embrace and promote, in order to fuel its campaigns and win electoral support. The extent to which Ms Sturgeon has been the front woman for his policies, and how far her policies have been her own, is not clear.
It has, however, been noticeable in recent months and perhaps even years that Ms Sturgeon has been less surefooted than previously, when, for a time, in and after 2015, it appeared that she walked on water. Decisions have been taken that have had adverse ramifications for her and her regime. The Named Person scheme, scheduled to be rolled out in 2016, was perhaps a straw in the wind, undermining as it did the position of parents vis-à-vis their children. The gamble of entering a coalition with the Scottish Greens, after the 2021 Holyrood election which left the SNP one seat short of a majority, was always likely to produce more problems than it solved. Instructing the Lord Advocate to take the case for Holyrood’s right to hold another referendum to the Supreme Court was another gamble, which backfired disastrously for Ms Sturgeon. Perhaps most damagingly of all, the insistence on pushing through the Gender Recognition Reform Bill in an uncompromising form spoke to a regime that was out of touch with popular opinion. It remains a matter for speculation how far Murrell was involved in these initiatives.
The impression has been of a wilful leader who is insulated from a broad range of advisers, trusting only the opinions of herself and a very small group of trusted associates. This, however, seemed strange, given the skill of Murrell in gauging the public mood and devising propaganda to work on it in the party’s favour. It began almost to look as if Murrell was no longer one of the trusted inner circle.
Yet he has perhaps committed his own missteps. Whether we will ever uncover the full truth of the Salmond case cannot yet be determined, but the impression is there is unfinished business there. Murrell may or may not have been directly involved in it – he certainly claimed at the Holyrood inquiry into the matter that he was not – yet his now infamous text messages about it suggest he was. The day after Salmond was charged with various counts of sexual assault in January 2019, Murrell texted ‘folk should be asking the police questions’, adding it was a ‘good time to be pressurising them’. Another message said: ‘the more fronts he [Mr Salmond] is having to firefight on the better’.
One ticking time bomb in the Salmond case was reported by Conor Matchett in the Scotsman on 15 March 2023. Responding to a Freedom of Information request, the Scottish Information Commissioner (SIC) has ruled that the Scottish government had claimed ‘incorrectly’ (nice euphemism) that information of a kind significant to the Salmond inquiry had been held not by the Scottish Government but by James Hamilton, the special adjudicator brought in to decide whether Ms Sturgeon had breached the ministerial code in the Salmond case. Matchett reports that the information included ‘highly controversial and legally challenging claims and detail’. The Scottish government is set to appeal the SIC’s ruling against it to the Court of Session. If the judgment goes against them, evidence withheld in the Salmond case may be published. This has the potential of dynamite.
I have wondered whether that issue has been the occasion for the flight from the party of its most senior officers and also the reluctance of other senior figures in the SNP to stand for the leadership of the party, recognising that it is a poisoned chalice. True, there are other issues: the police investigation into the missing £600,000 from SNP referendum funds is grinding on slowly. There is also the future of the Gender Recognition Reform bill, on which Humza Yousaf has promised to challenge the UK government if he wins the leadership. Again, there is also question of the £107,620 that Murrell personally lent the SNP, a very precise figure. George Foulkes has queried whether it might be a foreign exchange transfer, mentioning that the only currency which would have given a round figure at the time was Swiss francs.
We may be getting into the realms of the fanciful, but that is what happens when you live under an authoritarian regime whose increasingly manic obsession with secrecy encourages conspiracy theories. The Sturgeon-Murrell axis has created this system. It will be only just if its demise results from the exposure of its carefully guarded secrets.
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