Wings Over Scotland

Sadly, this turned out to be prescient this morning.

Laura Kuenssberg did give Nicola Sturgeon an uncomfortable time in their interview on her Sunday programme on BBC News, but when confronted with the one gaping open goal that Sturgeon has no answer for – and even when Sturgeon TWICE set it up on a plate for her – Kuenssberg failed to knock the ball into the empty net.

That doesn’t – by some distance – mean there was nothing of interest to note, though, so let’s take a walk through (the first instalment of) what was said.

Kuenssberg opens gently by asking if she didn’t notice anything odd over all the years of Murrell’s lavish spending, to which Sturgeon responds by saying that anything she saw in the house (eg a super-fancy £3,200 coffee machine) could plausibly have been afforded by Murrell on his SNP salary, which is broadly fair enough.

But the story soon starts to crumble.

Firstly, Tiffany diamond bracelets start at just a few hundred pounds. Even some of their top-ticket ones, like this (ahem) Wings bangle in platinum, come in at only a fraction of the price of a new Jaguar iPace, so it’s weird to suggest they’d have been a bigger red flag than the car.

But for Sturgeon to claim that she’s “not sure” whether the £2,200 Lalique salt and pepper grinders Murrell bought are the same ones that she used in the kitchen she says she never went into is comical. Even if you don’t know what they cost, they’re pretty darn distinctive and memorable.

Anyone putting a bit of salt on their sausage supper with those would surely pause for at least a moment to say “Ooh, these are fancy”.

We then get an extended sob story from Sturgeon about all the ways in which she’s a traumatised victim of Murrell (though immediately after it she says “I will never think of myself as a victim”), during which Kuenssberg lets her get away with falsely claiming she’s been “exonerated” and “cleared” of any wrongdoing.

Kuenssberg then gets onto the subject of the infamous campervan.

Well, Nicola, the reason it might have crossed your mind was because it was listed in the SNP’s accounts – which you signed off on and are both professionally qualified to understand and legally responsible for – as an SNP asset.

As to the camper’s visibility, incidentally, this is Murrell’s mother’s house. The Niesmann and Bischoff Smove 7.4e motorhome, at 24.3 feet, is considerably longer than the typical caravan, and would be quite difficult to avoid noticing even if you’d approached on foot to the front door from the garage side.

A Google Earth satellite image which captured it parked there showed it coming right up to the level of the front wall. It would have been unmissable from the bottom step.

(Just for fun, we asked ChatGPT to mock up what it would have looked like in the driveway, based on the positioning in that satellite shot. This is what it came up with.)

And the drive would be at a very odd angle/spacing to belong to the neighbours.

Although this is at least inventive.

What did she think it was? Cheese on toast?

She then throws SNP treasurer Colin Beattie under the wheels of the van.

But we must keep at the forefront of our minds that Sturgeon is legally responsible for signing off the accounts as being true and accurate. The idea that a £81,000 vehicle could have been explained away as hiring charges is absurd.

(And even that raises serious questions about the veracity of the accounts, since Murrell actually paid almost £125,000 for the camper, not £80,632.)

As Wings pointed out more than three years ago, you could have hired an entire fleet of much more suitable election-campaign vans (the ostensible official purpose of the Smove) for a small fraction of that money.

It was absolutely Sturgeon’s job and responsibility to question accounts which showed £81,000 of expenditure on vehicles for the party – which vehicles these were, what they were for, whether they were going to be sold to recoup the money etc.

Trying to dump it all off on Colin Beattie – the poor sap who wasn’t even allowed to SEE the books but could be counted on to meekly comply anyway, the exact reason he was brought back when Douglas Chapman resigned – is a squalid business.

At a minimum, the party treasurer publicly quitting because he hasn’t been allowed access to the figures in order to carry out his legal duties ought to cause the party’s leader to start doing some serious investigation into what’s going on, especially when half the Finance Committee has already quit for the same reason.

And that’s when Sturgeon’s answers REALLY start to get shifty.

After once again throwing Beattie to the wolves, Sturgeon pulls off a sneaky switch. She tells Kuenssberg that she had no reason to suspect “what Peter pled guilty to”, which was embezzlement of SNP funds for his own personal use.

But that isn’t what Kuenssberg had asked her about. She’d asked about money vanishing from the SNP’s accounts in 2019.

There are two separate arms to the Operation Branchform investigation: the fundraiser money that vanished from the SNP accounts, which we noted in January 2020, and Peter Murrell’s embezzlement of SNP funds to buy gaudy gew-gaws for himself, which only became apparent some time after the police investigation began in April 2021, following Sean Clerkin’s complaint based on Wings’ reporting.

(The point at which the Scottish media suddenly noticed and started giving itself awards for its great scoop.)

As the investigation progressed, the police had started to spot another story.

Sturgeon was trying to deflect from Kuenssberg’s question by answering a completely different question about something else. And that’s when Kuenssberg lost her concentration and totally fumbled the ball.

Trying to pass off the instant disappearance of hundreds of thousands of pounds that was supposedly “ring-fenced” and therefore untouchable as the normal “ebbs and flows” of party accounts is an outrageous dodge, and Kuenssberg just missed it.

She’d started off well, trying to block Sturgeon’s deflection from the missing fundraiser money onto Murrell’s embezzlement.

But Sturgeon just bulldozed past it and brought it back to the red herring that “one man committed a crime”.

The members of the SNP’s Finance & Audit Committee had resigned in March 2021, the month before the police began looking into the matter, and four months before the inquiry became a formal investigation in July.

Five months before the committee members quit, Colin Beattie had issued a strident denial that the fundraiser money had gone missing, insisting instead that it was “woven through” the SNP accounts – the literal polar opposite of being “ring-fenced”.

It’s ludicrous to suggest that Beattie would have been allowed to issue that statement without Nicola Sturgeon’s approval, and equally mad to suggest that Sturgeon would have approved it without checking the accounts that the money had supposedly been somehow “woven through”.

(An implausible enough line in itself, given that the SNP’s accounts had previously very carefully separated out “ring-fenced” funds from its general reserves.)

What are we being asked to believe happened here? That Sturgeon said “Colin, didn’t we just raise £700,000 for a ring-fenced indyref fund? So why is there only £97,000 in our bank balance?”, Beattie replied “Don’t worry, Nicola, it’s woven through the accounts in a way that appears to make it invisible” and she went “Oh, that all sounds legit, okay then”?

So the only possible explanation is that she DID look at the accounts and DID approve both the accounts and Beattie’s official statement, despite the fact that there was visibly, obviously, unmistakably £600,000 missing. And the only way that can have happened is that she KNEW the money wouldn’t be there, because she KNEW it had been spent on something else, and therefore when she looked at the books she didn’t see anything that she didn’t expect.

That isn’t Peter Murrell’s crime (except in so far as that he, along with Sturgeon and Beattie, had signed off the 2019 accounts). He hadn’t stolen anything like £600,000 at that point. By the end of 2019 his embezzling across 10 years had totalled a maximum of £221,000.

But even when Sturgeon then reminds Kuenssberg that the initial investigation was into the missing fundraiser money, Kuenssberg lets it go.

Wings Over Scotland has no idea what Nicola Sturgeon did or didn’t know about Peter Murrell’s embezzling. That’s not our business. What we’ve always been concerned with is the plainly fraudulent fundraising the SNP undertook in 2017 and 2019, garnering almost £700,000 in donations from independence supporters – not just SNP members – on the demonstrably false pretext that it would be ring-fenced for a future independence referendum, when there was clearly never any intention to set the money aside for that purpose.

We know that because at the end of 2017, having taken in nearly half a million pounds from the first fundraiser, it had under £8,000 to its name.

And by a remarkable coincidence, on 1 December that year it had repaid £500,000 in loans to Chris and Colin Weir., who by then had become disillusioned with Sturgeon’s iteration of the SNP and no longer wished to fund it.

It was under Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership that the party ran those fundraisers. It was Nicola Sturgeon who fronted them.

It was under Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership that the party furiously denied having spent the fundraiser money on something else, when it had clearly done so.

It was under Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership that the party then concocted a series of ludicrous and contradictory excuses to try to conceal where the money had gone, and embarrassingly transparent schemes to retroactively pretend to really be spending it on the pursuit of independence.

(Once again, note that this happened in January/February 2021, months BEFORE any sort of police inquiry had begun, so Sturgeon can’t use that as an excuse.)

That this issue remains unsolved – or at least, that nobody has been held accountable for it – after five years of Operation Branchform is the real story that should be occupying the media long after Murrell’s thievery falls off the front pages.

No explanation has been forthcoming from either Nicola Sturgeon, her successors as SNP leader, or Police Scotland, for what happened to that money, acquired under false pretences. Sturgeon rolled the ball across an undefended goal in the Kuenssberg interview, but Kuenssberg skied it over the crossbar just as badly as the Scottish media did when Wings first broke the story nearly six and a half years ago.

So we’ll need to wait for someone else to ask Sturgeon that question, or indeed to ask the Crown Office why they’re not interested in thousands of people being conned out of their cash.

There was many other issues raised by the interview, but this piece is long enough already so those can wait until next week. In the meantime, we’re disappointed but not surprised. If there’s one thing Nicola Sturgeon is good at it’s slippery lying, but even that skill is waning as far as the public is concerned.

We can only hope that one day the media will catch up and she’ll be made to sit down in front of an interviewer who’s sufficiently on top of their brief – dare we say from reading this website? – to actually properly nail her on it.