Peter Murrell’s shopping sprees expose the rottenness of the SNP

Peter Murrell, the ex-husband of former Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon, is set to spend a long time in prison. The former Scottish National Party chief executive (between 2001 and 2023) has pleaded guilty to embezzling over £400,000 from SNP campaign funds.

Concerns had first been raised about the SNP’s finances in October 2020 by pro-independence blogger Stuart Campbell. He had noticed that nearly £670,000 raised between 2017 and 2019 to campaign for a second independence referendum (IndyRef2) did not seem to be showing up in the SNP’s public accounts. It hadn’t been used to push for IndyRef2, so where had it gone?

In March 2021, in what is perhaps the most shameful and telling episode of the whole affair, SNP higher-ups denied three SNP officials on the party’s finance and audit committee in-depth access to the party’s accounts – an aversion to scrutiny all too typical of the SNP’s senior figures. The trio promptly resigned as a matter of principle. At a National Executive Committee meeting at the time, Sturgeon claimed that the party’s finances had never been healthier. She warned that anyone thinking of going public with concerns would be damaging the SNP.

An official complaint was then made to Police Scotland, which launched an investigation in 2021. Five years on, we now have an answer to the mystery of the missing funds. The first minister’s hubby had, to borrow Boris Johnson’s famous words, spaffed it up the wall.

It really does take a heart of stone to read Police Scotland’s 126-page indictment without laughing. We learn that Murrell wasn’t driven to nicking from the Nats by gambling debts or a drugs-and-hookers habit. No, it seems he just really liked high-end shopping. He is Imelda Marcos in tartan trews.

The big-ticket items include a Jaguar SUV for £81,000 and a luxury Niemann and Bischoff Smove 7.4e campervan, which set Murrell back £124,550. Even he seemingly realised the campervan looked a bit suspicious so, despite claiming it was to be used for campaigning, he stored it at his mother’s house in Fife. As you do.

Armed with a John Lewis catalogue and various SNP credit cards, Murrell also spent £3,232 on a Jura Giga 5 Cromo coffee machine, £2,618 on two Feuilles pepper and salt grinders, £1,990 on eight umbrellas, £1,475 on a Beatles special-edition fountain pen and rollerball, £550 on a 1:30-scale model of an Airbus helicopter… the list goes on and on. Such was the ostentatious nature of Murrell’s spending, his and Sturgeon’s famously ‘modest’ home in Glasgow must have looked like the interior of Harrods. There’s probably an exotic species or two hidden away in Nicola’s loft.

Questions (and eyebrows) are now being raised as to how Sturgeon could have been unaware that something was amiss. Her house would have been brimful with designer goods, a brand new Jag was parked outside, and a top-of-range campervan sat on her mother-in-law’s driveway. One might reasonably ask Sturgeon how she thought Murrell was funding such an outlay? Fortnum and Mason loyalty points? Scratch cards? Or perhaps it involved the never-spent campaign pot that independence campaigners and SNP members had been concerned about since 2020?

Sturgeon, who was cleared of wrongdoing by the police in 2024, has insisted this week that she had been ‘misled just as others were’. She has pointed to her husband’s £107,000 salary as her reason for thinking his spending was normal. It’s true Murrell’s earnings might explain away the two-and-a-half-grand salt-and-pepper cellars and the Helly Hanson vest sets, but a £81,000 Jag and a £125,000 campervan? As others have noted, she is guilty at the very least of being remarkably incurious.

As are other members of the SNP’s ruling clique. This includes current first minister John Swinney, a trusted adviser to Sturgeon and one of Murrell’s closest friends. Indeed, it was Swinney, during his first stint as SNP leader in 2001, who made Murrell the SNP’s chief executive. Like Sturgeon, Swinney has spoken of his shock and sense of betrayal. And, of course, he says he suspected nothing.

The whiff coming off the SNP leadership right now wouldn’t be quite so strong if this were an isolated scandal. If it could be limited to the actions of Sturgeon’s sneaky shopaholic husband. But the rot goes deeper. Since it won power in 2007 and then a Holyrood majority in 2011, the SNP has turned Scotland into what feels like a one-party state. It has governed – first under the late Alex Salmond (2007-2014) and then especially Nicola Sturgeon (2014-2023) – as a small, arrogant clique of technocrats, aided and abetted by a state-funded NGO-cracy and a civil service so pliant and submissive, it might as well have been integrated into the SNP itself.

Little wonder that SNP leadership has increasingly acted as a law unto itself, hiding and shielding itself from public accountability. We saw this during the Alex Salmond scandal a few years ago. The former SNP leader was investigated by Sturgeon’s government in 2018, following allegations of sexual assault against him. From the start, he claimed it was a politically motivated conspiracy to remove him as a threat to Sturgeon’s leadership. While these claims were unsubstantiated, a subsequent judicial review in 2019 ruled that the investigation was ‘unlawful’, ‘procedurally unfair’ and ‘tainted with apparent bias’ – the investigating officer had even had prior contact with Salmond’s accusers. Salmond was acquitted of all charges at a 2020 criminal trial.

In some ways, it was what happened afterwards that was most damning of the SNP. During a Holyrood inquiry into the Salmond affair, the government refused to hand over all the documentation related to the case, redacted Salmond’s evidence to the inquiry, and restricted what Sturgeon could be questioned about by MSPs. As then Scottish Labour leader Jackie Baillie put it at the time, ‘We are seeing that there is something rotten at the heart of the SNP, and it is poisoning our democratic institutions’.

The Salmond scandal exposed the malign traits of the SNP leadership. Its aversion to scrutiny, its defiance of accountability, and its overweening commitment to its own self-preservation. These were on show once more during Scotland’s public inquiry into the SNP’s handling of the Covid pandemic. It emerged that Sturgeon and others systematically deleted their WhatsApp messages as part of a concerted, civil service-backed effort seemingly to avoid being held to account at any future inquiry. In a telling moment, senior civil servant Ken Thomson warned his colleagues that their chat ‘is discoverable under [freedom of information]’ and wanted them to ‘know where the “clear chat” button is’. He boasted to colleagues that ‘plausible deniability are my middle names’.

The Murrell embezzlement scandal might only involve one member of the SNP, albeit an incredibly powerful one. But it’s difficult not to think of it as part of the same increasingly rotten SNP culture – of ‘plausible deniability’, accountability-dodging and an almost pathological lack of curiosity when it comes to the failings of its own. A party that has long been more committed to maintaining its grip on power and furthering its own leading individuals’ interests than in representing the interests of Scottish citizens.

Peter Murrell may no longer be able to spend campaigners’ hard-earned on designer bread bins and manicure sets, but there is still a powerful stench emanating from this decadent party. The reckoning the SNP deserves cannot come soon enough.

Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.