Peter Murrell’s £400,000 spending spree is the biggest, and certainly the most entertaining, political scandal to hit Scotland in years. The former SNP chief executive pleaded guilty to embezzlement at Edinburgh’s High Court on Monday after more than a decade of dipping into party funds to bankroll his fondness for the finer things.
Headline purchases included a succession of vehicles (Niesmann and Bischoff motorhome at £124,550; Jaguar I-Pace at £57,500; Volkswagen Golf at £16,489), coffee machines (Jura GIGA 5 at £3,232; Jura Z8 at £2,595; Jura Bean to Coffee Machine at £1,866), and luxury watches (Bremont Alt-1 in black at £4,795; Bremont Alt-1 in white at £4,555).
Nicola Sturgeon, Murrell’s wife, says she is ‘utterly appalled’ by his actions and insists she knew nothing. Former SNP MP Joanna Cherry accuses her of ‘a remarkable lack of curiosity’. What a rotten, cynical thing to say. That woman single-handedly led Scotland through a pandemic. She didn’t have time to stop and notice that her home was now doubling as an Amazon warehouse. Fine, so she overlooked a £2,600 salt and pepper grinder here and a £4,225 18-karat white gold pen there. That doesn’t mean she was incurious. It just means she’d have made a terrible contestant on The Generation Game.
The real story is not that Murrell was tanning the SNP’s bank account to fund a lavish lifestyle but that, once you get past the camper van and the coffee machines, his purchases were painfully twee and tacky. Some £3,500 on a hand-chased wine coaster in Britannia silver; £1,619 on Lalique vases; £1,600 on commemorative edition silver coin sets from the Royal Mint. This isn’t how an evil political genius spends other people’s money. It’s how an aspiring social-climber with no taste and even less self-awareness goes about trying to buy a bit of class. Peter Murrell is what would happen if Hyacinth Bucket turned to a life of crime.
The Scots have never been good at corruption. It’s a hangover from the dour presbyterianism of yesteryear, when open displays of wealth were deemed vulgar and sinful and the minister’s wife buying a second hat in as many years could prompt an emergency session of the parish elders.
The French. Now there’s a nation that knows how to do political corruption. Nicolas Sarkozy got done for criminal conspiracy over a deal to funnel millions from Colonel Gaddafi into the coffers of the French right. The Italians, meanwhile, are the Michelangelos of misappropriation, the Botticellis of brown envelopes. The mani pulite investigation into politicians on the take revealed corruption on such a scale that it saw Rome nicknamed Tangentopoli (‘Kickback City’) and led to the collapse of the First Italian Republic. Puts two-grand salt shakers into perspective, doesn’t it?
I could respect Peter Murrell if he’d used the cash to invest in a dodgy land development, bribe his way into the Lords, or have a political rival rubbed out. That’s good, wholesome embezzlement. If I were an SNP member, I wouldn’t object to my donations being misappropriated the old-fashioned way. I would object to it going towards a catalogue of overpriced tat that Liberace would have deemed a bit garish.
Murrell is reportedly looking at a prison sentence. Living with taste like his is surely punishment enough.
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