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.
