Wings Over Scotland

Peter Murrell wasn’t even locked up in his cell at Saughton (we hope it’s the same one as Craig Murray’s) when the chump-suckering resumed.

And as the Nicola Sturgeon Loyal, led by her most faithful of lieutenants, set out to try to take control of the post-conviction narrative, let’s take a look at just what a boatload of bare-faced bullshit the above is.

Everyone in Scotland, not just the SNP’s members or independence supporters, was a victim of Peter Murrell’s crimes. For a start because Operation Branchform cost close to £3 million of public money, dwarfing the £400,000 Murrell pinched to spend on a houseful of frou-frou knick-knacks. (The police bill alone of over £2m does not include the Crown Office’s costs.)

But even the cash directly trousered by Murrell didn’t just belong to SNP members. The pot of party funds he pilfered it from was filled from three main revenue streams:

(1) SNP members’ membership fees and donations

(2) UK taxpayer funding, the large bulk of the SNP’s income

(3) Money donated by the wider independence movement to two fundraisers which ultimately triggered Murrell’s arrest, which were supposedly “ringfenced” for an “Independence Referendum Campaign Fund” but in fact just disappeared into the SNP’s general treasury and from there into Murrell’s pockets.

That last one, incidentally, remains an unanswered question. The two fundraisers combined raised almost £700,000 but Murrell only copped a plea for misappropriating £400,000 of it, and the rest remains unaccounted for.

We know it was spent years ago because as far back as October 2020 there was only £97,000 left in the party’s bank account, and the SNP has tried a whole string of absurd madcap excuses to explain away the fact that it was plainly, demonstrably and fraudulently frittered away on lavish and wasteful general party spending – the exact thing they angrily insisted WOULDN’T happen.

Operation Branchform started as an inquiry into the missing fundraiser cash but then morphed into a wider embezzlement one, leaving the original complaints unresolved. The former has a different and narrower group of victims to the latter, and they still deserve answers, not from Peter Murrell but from Nicola Sturgeon and her then-deputy John Swinney.

But it looks like they’re ontae plums.

Sturgeon’s girlboss fanclub have pulled out all the stops to excuse her.

But Sturgeon quite literally WAS responsible.

Not because she was Murrell’s wife and £80,000 of very pricey Amazon parcels were piling up, unnoticed by her, in the kitchen they ostensibly shared (although we’re told that their marriage was such a facade that neighbours referred to the house as “The Prop”), but because she was his boss – and as such had a direct fiduciary duty to party members to stop him doing what he did – and because she personally signed off the accounts from which hundreds of thousands of pounds were missing.

Sturgeon can’t even plead simple ignorance, because she didn’t just direct enquiries to the party’s auditors. She repeatedly, actively and personally asserted, in public and in private, that there was NO missing money and that the party’s finances were in rude health and anyone suggesting otherwise would be for the high jump.

Murrell’s activities might have gone unnoticed by the auditors (whose remit is very narrow and technical), but you didn’t need to be an accountant to see that the money simply wasn’t there, you only had to be able to read.

If Wings, a humble website run by an idiot, could spot it in 2020 – by the simple act of noticing that 97 is a smaller number than 700 – then the party’s leader, whose legal responsibility it was, certainly could and should have.

That is something that still needs explaining after Murrell’s conviction. Two people – Sturgeon and treasurer Colin Beattie – both signed off on accounts that were clearly and obviously dodgy to even an amateur eye, and it’s difficult to tell why neither has yet been charged with any crime.

The most plausible explanation – which came to us from a senior former SNP source yesterday – is that the Crown Office, having already suffered an embarrassing defeat over Alex Salmond, didn’t want to risk being seen to have mounted two expensive and unsuccessful prosecutions of SNP First Ministers in a row.

But even if we leave aside for a moment the questionable neutrality of an organisation headed by a person who is also a Scottish Government minister and answerable to the FM, the state of the Crown Office’s delicate ego is not an adequate reason to abandon valid complaints about serious crimes.

Yesterday morning Sturgeon – “The people’s QUEEN, living her best life” – affected a breezy air, posting holiday snaps on Instagram along with a personal statement about how sad and shocked and etc she was over Murrell’s crimes.

She ended the statement with the words “I will be making no further comment”. So anyone previously familiar with her track record on promises therefore wouldn’t have been surprised when it was followed just hours later with a further comment.

While the first had been in her own name, the second statement was lawyered up. It was issued by semi-celebrity lawyer, publicity aficionado and political activist Aamer Anwar, and backed up by a threatening email Anwar sent to much of Scotland’s media.

We say “threatening”, but on close inspection it’s got about as much legal menace as a TV Licence reminder. If the media fail to delete defamatory comments by readers or viewers, it says, Anwar is instructed to “consider” legal action or – oh no! – complaints to the toothless press watchdog IPSO.

Also, the threat carries with it a tantalising proposition – any legal action brought by Sturgeon for defamation would result in her having to appear in the witness box and be cross-examined in forensic detail by the defendant’s lawyer about what she did and didn’t know. You could make a fortune selling tickets to such an event, and Sturgeon’s usual “I don’t remember” approach to questioning, as seen during the Salmond and COVID inquiries, wouldn’t cut much ice.

Yesterday also revealed something we were told by an unimpeachable source two years ago, but couldn’t talk about while Sturgeon was still under investigation for fear of contempt charges – the fact that despite claiming to have “fully co-operated” with police when she was arrested, she in fact turned her chair to the wall and didn’t say a word for seven hours. She is of course legally entitled to remain silent, but it’s a very stretched definition of the word “co-operating”.

(Just as it had been when she publicly pledged to give the Salmond inquiry anything it asked for, and then, in conjunction with John Swinney, directly obstructed it and refused to hand over documents on almost 60 separate occasions.)

For the record, and for the reasons already stated above, it is absolutely this website’s belief that Nicola Sturgeon knew there was money missing from the SNP’s accounts, and that she was lying when she said otherwise. Mr Anwar knows where to find us.

Today, the SNP will attempt to deflect from the scandal with another performative vote in Holyrood about demanding a second indyref, secure in the certain knowledge that it’ll fail.  John Swinney will attempt to alchemise the Parliamentary arithmetic into the “100% guaranteed” referendum he said would result from an SNP majority, despite the fact that he didn’t achieve one.

He won’t have any more luck than Sturgeon did when she pulled the same stunt twice before (in 2017 and 2020) then quietly scuttled off when Westminster said no, and no more luck than donors to the SNP’s “ringfenced Independence Referendum Campaign Fund” will have at getting either their stolen money or their dreams back.

Although by this time next year, both he on his First Minister’s salary, and Sturgeon on her fat book advance and other lucrative income streams, will indeed be millionaires.