What has been seen cannot be unseen. Some images are so potent that they become indelibly etched on to a nation’s retina. I think we can say that of the scenes in a comfortable suburb of Glasgow when police raided the home of Nicola Sturgeon, until very recently the all-dominant first minister of Scotland and in times past the most popular politician in the UK, and her husband, Peter Murrell, until very recently the SNP’s mightiest apparatchik and the maestro of its multiple election victories.
Police Scotland used incident tape to cordon off the location and erected a large tent over the front of the house. “It’s hard to get the imagery of the tent out of your mind,” confessed Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s leader at Westminster. Sure is. When some officers were seen in the garden brandishing spades, the casual viewer could have mistaken this for an episode of Silent Witness or Unforgotten. Another police squad searched the party’s headquarters in Edinburgh and removed many crates of material. Mr Murrell was arrested, taken into custody for more than 11 hours and questioned by detectives over allegations about the party’s finances before being released without charge pending further investigations. Party spin doctors sometimes describe events in terms of “the optics”. The optics of this are beyond ghastly for the SNP and beyond wonderful for their opponents.
