After two decades as an untouchable political force, the SNP is falling apart. Scandal piles on top of scandal and an ongoing police investigation (which this week led to the arrest of SNP treasurer Colin Beattie) can only intensify the party’s problems.
The nationalists’ political opponents, for so long fearful of their dominance, now laugh at the blackly comic details of this unprecedented crisis. Those SNP members not drowning in despair sustain themselves with bleak gallows humour.
It’s just before midnight when my phone pinged a few Saturday’s ago. A new message has arrived. The sender, an SNP politician, keeps things snappy. There are just five characters: “WTAF?”
I quickly compose a reply: “Hi-de-hi, campers.”
Shortly before this brief exchange, the ongoing crisis in the Scottish National Party has taken a lurch into the bizarre. News has broken that — as part of a police investigation into the finances of the party — officers have seized a luxury £110,000 motor home from the driveway in front of the house occupied by 92-year-old Margaret Murrell, mum of the SNP’s former chief executive, Peter Murrell, and mother-in-law to ex-First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon.
The days when the SNP appeared to be an unstoppable political force seem very long ago. Now, the party is at the centre of a seemingly unstoppable farce, with former allies turning on each other, poll ratings plummeting, and serious questions emerging about the credibility of Sturgeon’s successor, Humza Yousaf.
The SNP has long peddled a simplistic brand of Scottish exceptionalism where politicians are more honest and people more compassionate than those elsewhere. Now, it seems the party is extending that better-than-you attitude to the matter of political scandal: call that a crisis? This is a crisis.
When Sturgeon announced on February 15 that she was resigning as SNP leader and, therefore, Scottish First Minister, the news sent shockwaves through UK politics. After almost 16 years in government — the first seven as deputy First Minister to Alex Salmond and the rest in the top job — Sturgeon was established as the most successful politician of her generation, anywhere on these islands.
Sturgeon’s explanation for her decision, however, rang true. She no longer had the energy to give to the job and felt she’d become a barrier to the independence cause winning more support: people had made their minds up about Sturgeon and it was time for someone else to take the cause on to its next stage.
It was certainly true Sturgeon found herself in political difficulties when she came to her decision. A plan to treat the next General Election as a “de facto referendum” may have been lapped up by some of the SNP’s more excitable supporters but it went down badly with many elected members who pointed out that Sturgeon had no authority to declare that an election was, in fact, a vote on the question of independence.
Lingering behind Sturgeon’s resignation was another difficult issue. For the past two years, Police Scotland had been investigating a complaint about the SNP’s finances. At the centre of the complaint was a party fundraising exercise. Back in March, 2017, despite having no legal authority to run a vote on the constitutional question, Sturgeon announced plans for a second independence referendum. At the same time, her husband, Peter Murrell launched a crowd-funder to support the campaign to come. More than £600,000 was donated by people in favour of independence.
But no referendum took place and, by the end of 2019, the SNP had just £97,000 in the bank. When questions were asked about the donations, the party insisted this money could be deployed “at a moment’s notice”.
In May 2021, Douglas Chapman MP quit as party treasurer saying he had not been given access to the information he required in order to do his job properly. Two days later, Joanna Cherry MP resigned from the SNP’s ruling National Executive Committee, citing similar issues.
Sturgeon insisted she had no concerns about the party’s finances. Police Scotland, however, thought an investigation merited. Operation Branchform was launched and two years of police work culminated in a series of raids last Wednesday.
Officers erected tents in front of and behind the house Sturgeon and Murrell share in Uddingston, south east of Glasgow, retrieved several boxes of paperwork from SNP headquarters in Edinburgh, and seized that motorhome from Mrs Murrell’s homes in Fife.
Peter Murrell — who quit as SNP chief exec three weeks ago after it emerged the party had misled journalists about membership numbers — spent 12 hours in police custody before being released, without charge, pending further enquiries. During the contest to succeed Sturgeon as SNP leader, Humza Yousaf was happy to be seen as the continuity candidate. Though Sturgeon made no declaration in favour of any candidate, many of those closest to her not only enthusiastically endorsed Yousaf but heavily criticised contender Kate Forbes, a member of the Free Church of Scotland whose socially conservative views — she would, she said, have voted against legalising gay marriage had she been a member of the Scottish Parliament when legislation was passed — do not chime with the SNP’s story of being a uniquely progressive party.
In the end, Yousaf beat Forbes by a margin of just 52-48. He leads a bitterly divided party and he can’t get rid of those continuity candidate robes quickly enough. During the contest, Yousaf could be heard describing Murrell as “a proven winner” who had done more than just about anyone else to advance the cause of independence. Now, he would like it to be known that there were serious problems under the Sturgeon-Murrell regime and that he is determined to put them right. Yousaf would also like to make it clear that the SNP will not be paying Murrell’s legal fees.
Scotland’s new First Minister spent six weeks singing the praises of Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell from his campaign bus. Now he has thrown them under it. In the 2019 General Election, the SNP won 45% of the vote in Scotland, pushing Labour into third behind the Tories with just 19%. Now polling has the nationalists leading Labour by just 35-31%. And there’s time aplenty for things to get more difficult for the SNP.
There are now questions about the timing of police action. Had the raids taken place earlier, would Yousaf have won the leadership? Western Isles MP Angus MacNeil wants to put this to the test with a new contest. He said: “Peter Murrell appears to have intervened to significantly shorten the election process after the first minister surprised everyone with her resignation. We then had the issue of the media being misled on membership numbers.
“There are clearly questions to answer here. If it is the case that Peter’s arrest has been delayed to allow the first minister to resign and the vote to take place, then that could have had a material impact on the election result. It seems unlikely that the continuity candidate would have cut it if all of this had been known beforehand.”
Yousaf is now like the central character in a fable warning about the cost of ambition. Each day seems to bring a new humiliation, the most recent of which is that the fact the SNP’s auditors Johnson Carmichael had quit six months ago was kept from him until he won the leadership contest. No replacement for the company has yet been found, throwing up the possibility that the party might miss the July deadline by which accounts must be submitted to the Electoral Commission. At a time when Yousaf needs friends the mischievous gods of politics have given him Mike Russell, SNP president and acting chief executive.
As the new First Minister fought to get his fledgling leadership on track last weekend, Russell gave an interview in which he said the party was in its biggest crisis in half a century. He did not think independence could be secured right now. “All I can do,” added Russell, “is put my trust in others in working to get this right.”
And then the stinger: “Like it or not, the party has chosen Humza to do this.”
