Peter Murrell is a strangely shiny man. He has the air of an undertaker who’s been siphoning off the corpse lacquer to use on his own face. The erstwhile self-proclaimed ‘money man’ for the SNP arrived at court yesterday carrying a burglar’s hold-all, which for someone who was arriving to plead guilty to being on the rob was a fun touch.
There’s an almost laughable brazenness to the SNP – partly because they seem to keep getting away with it
After years of presenting themselves as the great moral alternative to all the wickedness and corruption in Westminster it is finally becoming clear that the senior echelons of the SNP were on the make in the grubbiest way possible. Murrell, who was also First Gentleman to the Grand McKrankie herself, Nicola Sturgeon, will be sentenced in June after an almost inconceivably OTT buying binge using party funds.
Among his purchases was £2,618 on salt and pepper shakers. Where was he buying this stuff, that basic household goods could have such a high price? A sort of special hyper-inflation John Lewis? A Weimar Republic TK Maxx? He also hilariously bought Grand Theft Auto V for £42.99, which rather makes us sketch writers think we’re destined to be replaced. Not by AI but by just plain old reality.
The SNP always like to maintain that they’re the denouement of Scotland’s grand battle for independence and so it’s amusing to play their own game and imagine what the other great moments of Caledonian struggle would look like were they conformed to the practices of the current custodians of the nationalist flame: Flora MacDonald smuggling the Bonnie Prince over the sea to Skye in a luxury motorhome, the spider counselling Robert the Bruce to invest in a Bremont World Timer Alt 1, and who can forget those final words of William Wallace: “They can take our men’s slouch pouch onesie but they’ll never take our freedom”?
Of course, the scandal comes within the context of the abominable outcomes which over a decade of SNP government have inflicted on Scotland – in education, in drug deaths, in the rise of a moribund public and intellectual life suffused with hypocrisy and cant. All of it has echoes of one of those corrupt African dictatorships, where the wives of Generalissimos would clear out Harrods while the World Food Programme intervened on the ground. Murrell’s fate is sealed as a tartan Grace Mugabe.
With Murrell now guaranteed to go down, whither Sturgeon? The former first minister has hilariously described being bought shed loads of jewellery as ‘profound personal trauma.’ She is still trying to maintain that all of this has come as a terrible shock and betrayal. We are being asked to take seriously the image of Sturgeon having to step over the boxes of jewellery, the crates of Mont Blanc pens and the new Jag and luxury motorhome just to gain entrance to their home and then ignoring all of them to ask Peter whether he did anything interesting at work that day. Perhaps the rumours are wrong, and Nicola just gets by as the least curious woman on the face of the planet.
The credibility gap for the SNP doesn’t only affect Sturgeon. Current First Minister John Swinney was a baldy bosom-buddy of Murrell’s. He decided to hold a press conference yesterday to distance himself. Appearing in front of a giant saltire, as if he were a piece of shortbread, Swinney told the press conference that he was ‘horrified and betrayed.’ He also refused to apologise to the numerous people who’d pointed out the dodginess of SNP finances years ago and were pilloried for their trouble. Perhaps, like Nicola, he was so horrified and betrayed that it clouded his judgement. The main gist of Swinney’s conference was to tell everyone that everything was fine now.
‘We’ve got to have good governance arrangements in place and that’s exactly what the SNP has got.’ It’s like the Black Hand Gang announcing that they are fully HR compliant. Swinney also repeated, with a straightish face, that he was absolutely convinced that Sturgeon was unaware of all the shenanigans. There’s an almost laughable brazenness to the SNP – partly because they seem to keep getting away with it. The main parties are so unpopular in Scotland that this be-kilted Zanu PF keep being returned to run the place, lining their own pockets as the country gets sicker and poorer. Whether the Murrell scandal is enough to stop Scotland turning into a full-on McBanana republic remains to be seen.
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