A crisis week for the Scottish National Party

The SNP was this week frantically seeking to manage the fallout from the arrest of its former chief executive Peter Murrell, Nicola Sturgeon’s husband, in an investigation into party finances.

Senior figures promised a review of SNP governance and transparency after Murrell’s arrest, saying that the party was facing its “biggest crisis” in 50 years.

The warning followed a dramatic week in which police conducted a two-day search of the home that Sturgeon and Murrell share in Glasgow. Officers also searched the SNP’s Edinburgh HQ and seized a camper van from the home of Sturgeon’s mother-in-law. The probe centres on complaints that party funds donated for an independence referendum campaign were misappropriated. Murrell was released without charge pending further investigation. Humza Yousaf, who recently replaced Sturgeon as SNP leader and First Minister, said that his party was fully cooperating with the police inquiry.

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‘Unprecedented in British politics’

Last week’s events were unprecedented in British politics, said The Guardian. Police inquiries into SNP finances have been ongoing since 2021, and were triggered by questions about how some £600,000 raised for independence referendum campaigning since 2017 had been spent when no such plebiscite has been held. A loan of £108,000 to the SNP by Murrell has also been the subject of scrutiny. Now, things have come to a head, in what amounts to “the most high-profile engagement ever seen between the criminal justice system and a modern British political party”.

The developments have “blindsided” the SNP, the wider nationalist movement and Scotland itself, said The Herald. They have also led cynics to query the reasons Sturgeon gave for her surprise decision to stand down as leader in February. As for Yousaf, he may regret pitching himself as the “continuity candidate” in the ensuing leadership election, said The Times. Only in the job for a few days before Murrell’s arrest, he described last week’s events as “not great” for trust in his party. “Catastrophic would be more accurate.”

“Some images are so potent that they become indelibly etched onto a nation’s retina,” said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. The sight of a police tent outside the home of Scotland’s erstwhile “power couple” is one of them.

‘Ghastly optics’

Until recently, Sturgeon was Scotland’s “all-dominant first minister”, and her husband was the SNP’s “mightiest apparatchik”, the maestro of multiple election victories. Yet last week, police removed crates of material from SNP HQ and were seen with spades in the couple’s garden, while Murrell was questioned for more than 11 hours by police. Yes, he’s innocent until proven guilty; but the optics of all this are “ghastly for the SNP”.

Yousaf was struggling to gain momentum even before Murrell’s arrest, said Andrew Liddle in The i Paper. With a reputation for incompetence, he had only narrowly beaten his rival Kate Forbes in an acrimonious leadership race, and his party’s poll lead was already starting to slip. Now, faced with a resurgent Scottish Labour and a barrage of negative headlines, his position suddenly looks vulnerable – and the SNP appears well on its way to being “dead and buried”.

That’s premature, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. The SNP has enjoyed an extraordinary period of dominance in Holyrood over the past 15 years; even under the stewardship of the “unexciting” Yousaf, it’s likely to remain in power. And while an independence ballot is unlikely in the near future, a solid 45% of Scottish voters don’t like being governed from Westminster: sooner or later “their case should be heard”.

This affair won’t finish off the SNP, agreed Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. The party has survived much turbulence over the years – from Alex Salmond’s incendiary allegations of a stitch-up by the SNP party machine, to the cover-up of a decline in party membership that cost Murrell his job – and its “die-hard loyalists” will stick by it no matter what. Yet with the whiff of scandal in the air, and Forbes ready to pounce if things unravel further, the challenge Yousaf faces to rescue his fledgling leadership is daunting.

What next

The SNP’s finances and governance were the subject of further questions this week, when it emerged that the party’s auditors, Johnston Carmichael, had resigned six months ago, the Financial Times reports. The party is yet to appoint new auditors.

Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross has rowed back on his advice to Tory supporters to vote tactically to oust the SNP. Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph, Ross had suggested that people should back Labour candidates if they have the best chance of beating the SNP in an election; but he reversed his stance after a slap down by Tory HQ.