Per Sir Humphrey Appleby: ‘A basic rule of government is never look into anything you don’t have to and never set up an inquiry unless you know in advance what its findings will be.’
It is in this spirit that John Swinney, Scottish First Minister and SNP leader, is resisting calls for a parliamentary inquiry into the SNP finances scandal. Peter Murrell, former chief executive of the Scottish Nationalists and estranged husband of Nicola Sturgeon, recently pleaded guilty to the embezzlement of £400,000 in party funds, which he spent on £2,000 pepper grinders, £4,000 pens, and most famously a £125,000 camper van.
Holyrood has been failing for at least two decades now and in those two decades Westminster has maintained its mission of ‘devolve and forget’
Holyrood’s opposition parties, which exist more in theory than in practice, want the Scottish Parliament to hold an inquiry into how Murrell got away with it for so long and whether anyone inside the SNP harboured suspicions but declined to act upon them. The idea of MSPs investigating anything more complex than long division is hard to take seriously.
Remember Murder She Wrote’s Amos Tupper, the bumbling small-town sheriff so dim-witted that he needed a local mystery novelist to solve all his cases? He was Sherlock Holmes compared to the average MSP. Now in its 27th year, and somehow becoming more mediocre by the year, Holyrood is an institution painfully unequal to the task being demanded of it.
