It’s been another fabulous day on the front pages for Nicola Sturgeon.
The stories were triggered by a speech in the House Of Commons from Tory MP Sir David Davis, which you can watch below.
Six weeks ago, Nicola Sturgeon said this:
Today, on her behalf, her perpetually furious lawyer said this:
So she was lying. Imagine literally nobody’s surprise. “I have nothing to hide, but I’m going to hide it anyway” is flawlessly in character.
Today’s Sunday Mail leads for the second weekend in a row on questions about the finances of Yes Scotland.
But there’s a paragraph in the online version of the story that doesn’t make the print edition, and it’s a shame, because it’s a very telling one.
Nobody’s beating this tweet today.
But as Peter Murrell begins a five-years-and-three-months prison sentence – more than we were expecting, in truth – let’s not lose sight of the key fact that the theft of hundreds of thousands of pounds of independence supporters’ money by the SNP, which accidentally exposed Murrell’s entirely separate crime of theft FROM the SNP, has still not been answered for by anyone.
Be assured, readers, that Wings won’t rest until it is.
This really is the most extraordinary statement.
The short version is “We’re going to keep breaking the law every day while we think about whether we want it to apply to us or not”.
We received two emails today, just a few minutes apart. There are a couple of notable things about them. The first came from Claire Somebody at the Crown Office.
The second one, even more thrillingly, came from Service Advisor 1989847 at Police Scotland, which we assume is some sort of advanced crime-fighting robot.
In one of those emails, readers, is a three-word phrase that raised our eyebrows just about right off our heads. Before we chat any more, see if it jumps out at you too.
John Swinney knows the rules. He can’t pretend he doesn’t.
So let there be no mistake about this: if Police Scotland and the Crown Office refuse to investigate the First Minister’s open public confirmation this week that a serious crime was committed by the SNP over the “ring-fenced” fundraiser money from 2017 and 2019, it will be beyond any fair dispute that Scotland is a corrupt banana republic where the powerful and the elite can simply do whatever they want, as brazenly as they like, and the law will turn a blind, uncaring eye.
If you subscribe to the theory that it’s better to fight 100 duck-sized horses than a single horse-sized duck, the SNP is knocking it out of the park today.
Because the papers just can’t make their minds up about the biggest story with which to attack John Swinney’s beleaguered party.
You’ve had a few pretty gruelling pieces to get through in the last week or so, readers, so here’s something a little more light-hearted.
It’s from an episode of Broadcasting Scotland on 27 November 2020, a month after we confirmed our big story about the SNP accounts and the missing fundraiser money. In it, snug-toed SNP MP Pete Wishart opines that there really is nothing to worry about, and we should all just put our trust in the party.
We’ll leave you to judge whose opinion stood the test of time.
On Sunday, Nicola Sturgeon told Laura Kuenssberg that the SNP’s accounts “went up and down” as her excuse for not noticing that hundreds of thousands of pounds had suddenly vanished from them overnight.
Several things leap out immediately from that clip.
One, there absolutely very much WAS “something glaringly suspicious in the accounts that I should have seen” – the party she led had raised almost £700,000 in two “ring-fenced” fundraisers that wasn’t there any more, which ought to have made its leader at least mildly curious.
And two, attempting to fob responsibility off onto the independent auditors simply won’t wash. It’s not their job to determine whether the SNP has kept its political promises or not, their job is simply to match up money coming in against money going out and produce a set of numbers to show what it all adds up to. It makes no odds to them if it was spent on a party conference, a fancy motorhome or a 50-foot golden statue of Danny La Rue. All they can see is numbers.
(In any event the party’s longstanding auditors resigned in 2023 rather than risk being caught up in any more dodginess. It took months for the SNP to find anyone else willing to take the job on.)
But even leaving those things aside, if we’re going to learn anything about how The Great Indyref Swindle got to this calamitous point unchecked we need to examine just how hard Nicola Sturgeon had to look the other way to fail to see what was going on literally under her nose and literally in her own back yard.
Now that Nicola Sturgeon is finally free of her gruelling MSP workload, which could give her anything up to two extra hours of spare time a week, she might like to start making a proper dent in the contents of her fully-loaded bookshelves.
(At least until they’re seized and sold under the Proceeds Of Crime Act.)
So we thought we’d offer up a few suggestions.
The multi-statement meltdown that has been the unravelling of Nicola Sturgeon this week has been quite something to behold. Last night, for example, we swear our Twitter feed presented these two tweets one after the other.
But then we read something even more extraordinary.
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