Peter Murrell, the former chief executive of the SNP, appeared “for 20 excruciating minutes” at the High Court in Edinburgh on Monday, said Tom Peck in The Times. His earlier guilty plea meant there was little prosecuting to be done. “What we saw, instead, was a High Court edition of ‘Supermarket Sweep’”, as the prosecutor detailed how Murrell had embezzled £400,000 from the SNP over 12 years and spent it on 627 items in total, from £3.60 door fixings to the infamous £124,000 motorhome. How did he get away with it? Because “the Great Expenser” was in charge of the process. “He submitted his expenses to himself, then he signed them off himself.”The list “makes for dazzling reading”, said Louis Wise in the FT: not just the Jaguar, the Golf, the luxury watches, the £2,000 salt and pepper shakers – but also “no fewer than seven – seven! – vacuum cleaners”. One luxury goods PR described Murrell's splurge as “like a regional sales manager's idea of living large”. But actually it's stranger than that – from the £75 men's “slouch pouch” onesie, to the Xbox, the 108 Covid-era loo rolls, and the posh edition of Hannah Arendt's “The Origins of Totalitarianism”.
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