Friends Without Benefits
We’ll be honest with you, readers, if we were in a situation where a lawyer was issuing statements for us, this isn’t what we’d want to hear.
“If my client had been charged, she’d be in prison right now” is a worrying distance short of a vote of confidence in your client’s innocence.
But the statement Aamer Anwar put out for Nicola Sturgeon last night – her FOURTH in 48 hours, despite saying on Monday morning that she’d be making no further comment on the Peter Murrell case – had rather more wrong with it than even that.
Firstly, like the third statement, released earlier the same day, it was a shockingly false description of how the legal system works.
The short version of that is: the police can’t just arrest people on a whim – they need to have some evidence first, before they can question you under caution. If you then clam up for seven hours and give them absolutely nothing (or in Nicola Sturgeon-speak, “co-operate fully”) then there’ll be a lower chance of any charge being successful, especially if, as a purely hypothetical general example, your potential co-accused is protecting you as part of a plea deal.
It might also be speculated that if – again as a purely hypothetical general example – the head of the organisation responsible for deciding whether you should be charged is someone you appointed and who used to be answerable to you as a minister in your government, that might also reduce the chances of charges being laid against you.
Especially given the Crown Office’s shameful record in recent years.
(We also can’t help but pause to note in passing the difference in tone between “she wasn’t charged which proves she’s innocent” and Sturgeon’s previous attitude towards legal judgments, which leaned more towards “Okay, he was acquitted on every charge by the jury but he did it anyway”.)
In such circumstances, which might give rise to considerable public suspicion (merited or not), having your own lawyer say “If my client had been charged she’d have been found guilty and banged up” is perhaps not the most helpful of protestations.
It’s particularly curious because Aamer Anwar ought to be an extremely loyal servant to Sturgeon. He’s been an SNP member at least since she became leader in 2015, to the extent that he was nominated as a candidate for that year’s general election.
He’s also a long-time independence activist, speaking at the Believe In Scotland march and rally in Edinburgh two months ago.
His friendship with the top echelons of the SNP has served him well.
Anwar describes himself as a “human rights campaigner” and a “political activist”.
(He’s currently representing Fahir Amaaz and Muhammed Amaad, two Muslim men accused of violently assaulting police officers at Manchester Airport in 2024 in a case which may go to a third trial.)
But despite that he’s never registered as a lobbyist under the Lobbying (Scotland) Act 2016, which activist lawyers are required to do.
(Something which has been noted in the Scottish Parliament.)
Readers may feel – we have no opinion ourselves – that a self-confessed political activist lawyer who refuses to register as one, and who is doubly unlikely to be seen as a neutral disinterested professional on matters relating to the SNP leadership due to his close connections to both the party in general and its senior figures personally, is a slightly reckless choice if you wish your pronouncements about your innocence to be taken seriously.
Then again, more than one prominent figure in the Scottish legal system has privately expressed to Wings the opinion that Anwar’s most recent two statements on Sturgeon’s behalf have been so wildly unhelpful to her that he might be suspected of being a double agent. He certainly wasn’t always a fan.
Anwar lists one of no fewer than 12 specialist services as “Reputation Management”.
On the evidence of this week so far, it might be an idea for him to narrow his focus a bit. Personally, though, we just can’t wait for Statement 5.
You are SUCH a bitch. I’ve always loved that about you!!
Asking again, does anyone know or can anyone surmise why the investigation took years and years, given we are not talking about some criminal mastermind, but more, in the words of Stephen Daisley, of a turned-to-crime Hyacinth Bucket kind of character?
Fraser Nelson’s contemporaneous quote-tweet of the STV News tweet:
link to x.com
Which links to the tweet in question:
link to x.com
Curiously, the tweet appears to have gone missing in the intervening years.
It would be interesting to know when the tweet was deleted, and who instructed it to be deleted.
Big surprise JS vetoing an independent investigations, all it takes for evil to prevail is honest people turning a blind eye. If he says he never knew about the embezzlement, what’s he got to lose.