The arrest of the man who has been by far the most important official of the Scottish National party for more than two decades is liable to be a defining moment for its future credibility. Until he resigned last month, Peter Murrell’s influence in Scottish political life was hard to exaggerate. Though he had worked mainly behind the scenes since starting with the SNP in 1999, he is married to Nicola Sturgeon and has always run a tight regime. He was the SNP’s unchallenged organiser of multiple election victories. For the past decade, only Ms Sturgeon has had more clout than he.
It is therefore important to stress, both for the sake of basic fairness and because conspiracy theories are now thriving, that the police investigation is ongoing and has not ended, and that no charges have been either laid or proved. Mr Murrell was released without charge on Wednesday. Nevertheless, the events of this week are also without precedent in British politics.
The arrest of Mr Murrell for 12 hours, the arrival of the police outside the home he shares with Ms Sturgeon in Glasgow this week and the police search of the SNP headquarters in Edinburgh all add up to something important and new: the most high-profile engagement ever seen between the criminal justice system and a modern British political party. To understand what is at stake, non-Scots should try to imagine the tensions and responses if the house and offices of a recently retired British prime minister had been searched in the same manner. This is a high-stakes moment for politics generally.
The issues being investigated by the police appear to involve significant amounts of money and issues of regulatory management. These include more than £600,000 donated by independence supporters to the party since 2017 for an independence referendum campaign that has not so far taken place. Questions started to be asked in 2021 after SNP accounts showed that the party had under £100,000 in the bank at the close of 2019. Mr Murrell then also lent the party £108,000 in 2021.
Given the closely knit working practices of the SNP top brass under Mr Murrell, there is much still to discover. Questions about what was known by whom and when may rise to the surface sooner or later. So may the issue of whether the police timed their operation this week to take place after the SNP leadership election rather than before it was complete.
It is a baptism of fire for the new SNP leader and first minister, Humza Yousaf. He himself does not appear to be part of the police investigation. He made clear on Thursday that he believes the Sturgeon/Murrell way of running the SNP was too opaque and that the party must be more transparent. That is good. Better late than never.
Yet Mr Yousaf is also a creature of the old system. He campaigned as the continuity candidate to succeed Ms Sturgeon against Kate Forbes’s calls for a reset, and he received widespread backing from many at the top of the SNP on that basis. He was a minister for every minute of every Sturgeon government. It is understandable that Mr Yousaf may want to cut his predecessors loose now. But his opponents inside and outside the SNP can sense his current weakness and can see that Scotland’s once-dominant party has not looked more vulnerable at any time in the last 20 years.
