Peter Murrell, collective denial, and the reckoning Scotland hasn’t had
THE SOCIOLOGIST Eviatar Zerubavel observed that denial is never merely a personal act. It is a social one. It requires infrastructure, rules, and participants. Silence does not just happen; it is maintained. The elephant in the room, he noted, does not need to be hidden. It only needs not to be mentioned.
On 26 May 2026, Peter Murrell stood in the High Court in Edinburgh and pleaded guilty. Between August 2010 and October 2022, the chief executive of the Scottish National Party — the husband of the woman who led Scotland’s government for eight years — embezzled £400,310.65 of party funds. The money went on a motorhome, two cars, luxury goods from Mont Blanc and Fortnum & Mason, designer kitchenware, gaming consoles, expensive pens, and salt and pepper grinders costing £2,618. He used false accounting codes. He did this, undetected, for twelve years.
The criminal chapter is effectively closed. Murrell is to be sentenced on 23 June. But the elephant was never his alone. It belonged to the room. And the more important question — the one that bears most directly on Scotland’s democratic health — is who else was standing in it, and why, for so long, they chose not to look.
I. To understand how the silence was built, it helps to understand what Zerubavel means by the social structure of denial. A conspiracy of silence does not require coordination. It does not require anyone to decide, consciously and explicitly, that a truth shall be suppressed. It requires only that enough people, independently and for their own reasons, decide that looking away is more comfortable than looking. The rules of denial are learned, shared, and socially policed. The grammar of evasion is itself a collective practice.
In the SNP’s case, the architecture of that evasion was visible, in retrospect, from an early stage — and the material from which it was constructed was hiding in plain sight.
The SNP’s 2019 accounts showed cash at hand collapsing from £411,042 the previous year to just £96,854. Reserves had fallen from £591,077 to £271,916. Nowhere in those accounts was any clear trace of the £482,000 independence referendum fighting fund that the party had been publicly trumpeting since a 2017 crowdfunding exercise. SNP Communications Director Ross Colquhoun had tweeted as recently as February 2021 that £600,000 had been ring-fenced for independence referendum preparations that financial year.
When the discrepancy was raised, then-National Treasurer Colin Beattie offered an explanation that invited more questions than it answered. He stated that the SNP, like all other parties, did not separate restricted funds in annual accounts, and that such donations were “woven through” the overall income figures. Woven through is, linguistically, the opposite of frozen. Moreover, the claim was false on its face: the SNP’s own 2012 financial statements had explicitly itemised restricted funds, including a referendum fund, and the treasurer responsible for those accounts was Beattie himself.
Nicola Sturgeon, pressed about the swirling allegations, said she was “not concerned” about party finances and that the accounts were “independently and fully audited.” She also stated that they were managed “on a cash flow basis” — a claim that did not survive scrutiny, since the SNP’s accounting policies section showed the party used accrual accounting, not cash basis accounting. These are not interchangeable terms. A First Minister who either did not know the difference, or chose not to clarify it publicly, was not equipping voters or party members with the information they needed.
These statements were not slips. They were crafted with care and issued as official positions. They are what Zerubavel calls the rules of denial: the shared grammar through which a collective silence is not merely maintained but actively reproduced.
The auditors, Johnson Carmichael LLP, had by June 2021 done something they had never previously done in their SNP reviews: identified “the greatest potential for fraud” in the party’s revenue recognition procedures. Revenue recognition is not a peripheral concern. It is precisely the mechanism through which money can be recorded in ways that do not reflect its true nature or purpose. In September 2022, Johnson Carmichael resigned. SNP officials then concealed that resignation from the party’s own National Executive Committee, from senior cabinet ministers, and from the candidates competing in the subsequent leadership election — for six months. Humza Yousaf discovered that his party had lost its auditors only after he had won the leadership contest. He did not dispute that this was, as he put it, “extraordinary.”
A party that was publicly defending its finances by pointing to independent audit had, in private, quietly lost its auditors and told almost no one. That is not a governance failure. It is a description of an institution whose accountability structures had been systematically emptied of content.
II. The structure of denial is the structure of information control. What Zerubavel’s framework shows us is that collective silence is not merely sustained by those who lie. It is sustained by those who are prevented from knowing, and by those who could know but choose not to ask.
In March 2021, three members of the SNP’s Finance and Audit Committee resigned simultaneously, citing lack of access to the party books. Two months later, Douglas Chapman resigned as National Treasurer. His statement was precise and unambiguous: “Despite having a resounding mandate from members to introduce more transparency into party finances, I have not received the support or financial information to carry out the fiduciary duties of National Treasurer.” The Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 makes a national treasurer legally responsible for keeping proper accounting records. Chapman was telling the public, in plain terms, that he was being obstructed in the performance of a statutory duty.
The following day, Joanna Cherry KC resigned from the SNP’s NEC, citing factors that had “prevented me from fulfilling the mandate party members gave me to improve transparency and scrutiny.” Three finance committee members in March. The National Treasurer in May. A senior NEC member the following day. All citing the same obstruction. All resigning rather than continue in roles carrying legal or fiduciary responsibilities they were being prevented from exercising.
John Swinney was then Deputy First Minister of Scotland. He had sat at the top of the SNP for decades. On 30 May 2021, the BBC asked him about Chapman’s resignation. Swinney’s response was remarkable: he said he did not understand why Chapman had quit.
There are only three interpretations available. The first is that Swinney genuinely did not know — that a man at the centre of Scottish government and SNP leadership for thirty years was so isolated from events that multiple simultaneous resignations by his party’s financial oversight personnel had escaped his notice. This does not survive contact with reality. The second is that he knew, broadly, what was happening but had chosen not to ask — that the political culture presided over by Sturgeon and Murrell had so thoroughly trained deference into its senior figures that willed incuriosity had become second nature. The third is that he understood perfectly well, and chose to tell the BBC that he did not.
None of these explanations is flattering. What they share is this: in none of them is Swinney a bystander innocently caught off guard. His claimed incomprehension was not the incomprehension of a man facing the unknown. It was the incomprehension of a man looking directly at a pattern he had every reason to understand, and declining to acknowledge it.
The personal dimension matters here. Murrell and Swinney are old friends, their acquaintance stretching back to schooldays. It is entirely plausible that Swinney received reassurances from Murrell and accepted them in place of the institutional scrutiny that was visibly collapsing around him. If so, it does not excuse him. Chapman, Cherry, and the resigned committee members were not communicating privately to close associates. They were making public statements about statutory obstruction. Taking Murrell’s word against that backdrop was not due diligence. It was a choice.
The price paid by those who refused to make that choice should not pass without remark. Joanna Cherry has described the backlash she faced as “very unpleasant.” She was demonised, removed from the frontbench, and systematically characterised as a wrecker for asking questions about figures that turned out to be fraudulent. She told the BBC this week that she had detected “ineptitude and a whiff of corruption behind the scenes” from 2017 onwards, and had pursued those concerns through the proper internal channels. She has been comprehensively vindicated. She has not, as yet, received anything resembling an acknowledgement from Nicola Sturgeon.
Sturgeon’s BBC interview following the guilty plea was composed, assured, and largely forensic in its avoidance of the governance questions that actually remain open. The line that will have pleased her supporters — “I am not responsible for the crimes that my former husband committed and I’m not going to apologise for somebody else’s crimes” — was an answer to a question nobody serious is asking. Nobody has asked her to apologise for her husband’s crimes. She did not face charges from prosecutors, that legal position is settled and must be respected.
What has not been settled is something distinct from criminal culpability. It is the question Cherry put, with admirable precision, in the days following the plea: not whether Sturgeon knew what Murrell was doing, but why those who tried to exercise legitimate financial scrutiny over the party she led with what Cherry describes as “a rod of iron” were so consistently frustrated, demonised, and removed. That is a political question. Having faced no charges of wrongdoing is not the same as having rendered a full political account of the governance culture of the party she led for eight years — a party whose chief executive was stealing throughout almost the entirety of her leadership.
Swinney, when asked this week whether Cherry was owed an apology, did not answer the question. The resistance to a proper accounting is, itself, a data point.
III. Why has Scotland not had a proper reckoning with the Sturgeon era? The answer lies in the operation of two mirror-image bad-faith positions that have, between them, made honest political assessment almost impossible.
The first is the unionist conflation. For a significant section of Scotland’s pro-UK commentariat, the SNP’s governance failures — real as they are, and documented at length — have become primarily useful as a debating point against independence itself. The implicit argument runs: look at the SNP’s record, therefore the case for Scottish self-government collapses. This is a category error. The performance of a particular party in office for a particular period is not a verdict on a constitutional proposition that will outlast any government. It is a critique of that party’s stewardship. Treating it as anything more produces a rhetoric that independence supporters can legitimately reject as bad faith, and which therefore fails to land even when the underlying criticisms are entirely well-founded.
The second, and in the current moment more consequential, is the nationalist conflation. Within the independence movement, scrutiny of Sturgeon has been persistently coded as hostility to the cause. To question her governance was to give ammunition to the union. To press on the finances was to be a traitor. This is the mechanism Zerubavel identifies as social policing of the silence: not suppression by authority, but self-enforced incuriosity maintained by tribal loyalty. It is also the mechanism that made twelve years of embezzlement possible, because the same logic that discouraged questions about Murrell’s accounts discouraged questions about everything else.
These two conflations are not symmetrical in their effects — the nationalist version has been more directly operationally harmful — but they are symmetrical in their function. Each creates a political environment in which the substance of what happened is subordinated to what it is being used for. Each protects a set of interests at the expense of an honest account.
The consequence is that Scotland has spent several years without anything resembling a proper political audit of the Sturgeon era. That era contains achievements — some real, some illusory — and failures that range from the significant to the serious. It contains a governance culture in which institutional accountability was progressively subordinated to personal and movement loyalty. It contains a decade-plus of embezzlement by the party’s chief executive. And it contains a period in which legitimate internal scrutiny was punished harshly enough that the people attempting it found resignation preferable to continuation.
None of that analysis is available to Scotland while the unionist response is to weaponise it against self-government and the nationalist response is to dismiss it as unionist bad faith. Both reactions serve their respective tribes. Neither serves the public.
What Cherry is calling for — a fully independent inquiry into how Murrell’s embezzlement was possible for twelve years, and into why the attempts to scrutinise the party’s finances were frustrated — is not a partisan demand. It is a basic democratic request. Public funds were not visibly involved; the SNP is a private organisation. But the SNP was also, for the relevant period, the party of government, and the governance culture it embodied extended into every public institution it touched. Scotland’s lanyard class — the professional-managerial cohort that populated not just the party but the public bodies the party controlled — absorbed and reproduced the same reflexes: the performance of accountability without its substance, the optics of scrutiny without its exercise. Understanding how that culture was built and what it cost is not an exercise in partisan point-scoring. It is a precondition for building something better.
Peter Murrell will be sentenced on 23 June. He abused a position of trust, systematically, for over a decade. He must face the consequences.
But Scotland’s democratic health will not be served by treating the guilty plea as the end of the story. The elephant in the room never belonged to one man. It belonged to everyone standing in it — the officials who willed themselves incurious, the media establishment that professionalised itself around a political settlement it lacked the musculature to scrutinise, and the tribal loyalties, on both sides of the constitutional question, that made honest accounting feel like betrayal.
Zerubavel’s point is that the elephant disappears from view not through deception alone, but through collective and sophisticated arrangement. Dismantling that arrangement requires something the Scottish political debate has so far mostly declined to supply: the willingness to look at what happened, without immediately asking what it can be used for.
Scotland needs a thorough accounting of the Sturgeon era. It needs it on the merits — free from the unionist temptation to use it as a constitutional weapon, and free from the nationalist temptation to dismiss it as one. And it needs it now, while the evidence is fresh, the participants are active in public life, and the governance culture it would examine is still shaping the institutions it built.
The guilty plea is not the reckoning. It is the moment when the reckoning becomes unavoidable.
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