The SNP’s slow-motion campervan crash has lifted the nation’s spirits

Regardless of one’s political leanings, I defy anyone to watch wee Nicola Sturgeon interrogated on the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg, and see her eyes moisten and hear the catch in her voice as she recalls the moment when she realised all her little trinkets and gleaming love tokens from her former SNP colleague and estranged husband Peter Murrell were as good as fenced… and not get at least a semi.

Not a semi big enough to hide a luxury campervan behind, obviously. But maybe enough to conceal a top-of-the-range Mont Blanc ‘StarWalker World Time’ fountain pen. You know, the one with a quaint little old fashioned bezel on the shaft? That you can twist to learn the time in all the other countries in the world that have never even heard of the SNP? I can’t help wondering if Scotland has its own designated time line on that shaft, or whether Nic and Pete had to confabulate ‘Glasgow Mean Time’. I doubt I shall ever get close enough to find out.

It’s a small point to make about Murrell’s thievery, but if you are going to embezzle funds from the Scottish National Party to buy a fancy pen named after a big mountain, surely it should have been a Ben Nevis? Murrell should have checked out Etsy, where he’d have found said pens, carved out of old whisky barrels. Really.

The StarWalker is at least aiming high, though. A bit steampunk, but I get it. A bit of genuine swank. Some of Pete’s other purchases had almost more bathos than even a swine like me can bear. He bought not one but three Dualit kettles. Posh, but still, kettles. Followed almost immediately by two Le Creuset stove top kettles, the whistling ones.

At this point, unless he was running a consumer-testing site, he’s clearly gone mad, possibly with guilt. It has to be plausible that this is the sort of mental malfunction that occurs when a man of very limited intellect finds himself briefly getting away with a financial fraud but has no real plan beyond the embezzlement itself. The whistling kettles almost suggest a subconscious desire to be caught, to have a chorus of hollow mouths telling on him in fluted harmony, like in an old black and white cartoon. It is a sort of tawdry 21st-century consumerist variant on Crime and Punishment, or an unpublished draft of Edgar Allen Poe.

I do genuinely feel a bit sorry for him, for this humiliation. Overall though, my prevailing emotion watching this scandal unfold over the past three years is one of profound gratitude – as I suspect it also is for many of us grim-faced old Sassenachs. The defenestration of Sturgeon’s reputation, and by extension the SNP’s, through the awkward quarter-lights of an apparently invisible Winnebago, has taken place with a glacial yet implacable pace that has really brought out the ghastly beauty of every twist and turn. It has been like a Béla Tarr slow-cinema remake of the Arthur Fowler and the Christmas Club storyline on Eastenders.

Angela Rayner has come from opposition to be deputy prime minister, bought a flat in Hove, got exposed for a dodgy stamp-duty swindle, lost her job and now gone on to be second favourite to be the next prime minister – all in the time it has taken for even a few frames of Sturgeon-gate to elapse.

The extended run of this parochial low-rent farce, from that glorious day in April 2023 when the filth first parked their tents on the Sturgeon lawn, to Murrell’s appearance in court today, has been one of the few things that has kept me going while the rest of the country has been audibly falling apart. True, we have de-industrialised at a speed rarely seen without recourse to the Black Death; we have witnessed almost daily horrors involving knives, children and ‘messaging’ that frankly cannot make me feel ‘numb’ soon enough; and we have become aware that in every figurative, technological arms race – as well as the actual arms race – the US and China are scowling at one another like Arsenal and City, with Europe and the UK barely able to muster a plucky cup run.

But as long as the wee Sturgeon continues to tease us with the implausibility of her innocence, I’m still putting up the ante. In her defence, I will acknowledge that one of my favourite and most regularly quoted philosophers, Douglas Adams, suggested some 40 years ago the mechanism by which a large motorhome can indeed become invisible if one is adequately motivated to be blind. He called it the ‘SEP Field’ – short for ‘Somebody Else’s Problem’. It makes an object invisible ‘by relying on the human tendency not to see something they don’t want to, aren’t expecting, or cannot explain’.

In his Life, the Universe and Everything, the field was used to conceal a spaceship that has parked on Lord’s Cricket Ground. Whereas that required several hundred people to ignore it at the same time, concealing the motorhome only required Sturgeon to not see it if she didn’t want to.

In a way, I don’t want Sturgeon-gate to end. The sport is too delicious. And the longer it goes on, the more the cheap silver plate of devolved anti-Westminster politics tarnishes beyond repair.

It was Adam Smith, one of Sturgeon’s most eminent Scottish forebears, who observed that ‘there is a great deal of ruin in a nation’. It’s an odd way of saying it perhaps, but Smith’s meaning – intended to console a friend who was panicking that losing the American War of Independence would ‘ruin’ Britain – was that nations draw from deeper wells than we sometimes imagine. That their resilience, their capacity to absorb damage, is easily underestimated. That they might even eventually be strengthened, like bone, with impact.

But while a nation may not be easily ruined, a political project may be. And its most dangerous foe is always ridicule. Many are understandably furious with the SNP’s first couple for the gravity of Murrell’s crimes. But I am most indebted to them, for the levity of their swag. ‘Against the assault of laughter’, said Mark Twain, ‘nothing can stand’.

So it is to be hoped that that absurd six-grand Mont Blanc, along with the kettles and coffee machine and the campervan and the rest, has done for them now. When it comes to decapitations, that pen is truly mightier than the sword.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Staring at the Sun, are on sale here.