A second Northern Ireland?

An interesting and almost definitionally neglected aspect of journalism is the stories we stop telling. A glance through the pages of the day’s papers (or for a better reading, this month’s Critic) gives you an idea of what’s important; but only by comparing that output to past coverage can you really get a feel for what we’re not talking about anymore.

The Scottish National Party is such a story. When I first started blogging in 2011, they were still a marginal force in Westminster (just six seats, can you believe it) and had not yet secured the overall majority in Holyrood which would catapult them to prime time. Since then, I covered their almost breaking up the United Kingdom in 2014, achieving a near-clean sweep of Scotland’s parliamentary seats in 2015, and then the long song and dance about whether Nicola Sturgeon would be able to use the Brexit referendum to secure a second vote on independence.

So, when the first rumblings of a financial scandal inside the SNP first started rumbling in 2021, it seemed likely that the police investigation which became Operation Branchform could end up being a critical factor in the very survival of the Union. Fast forward to today, when Peter Murrell — Sturgeon’s ex-husband and the SNP’s long-serving chief executive — has pleaded guilty to embezzling more than £400,000 from its accounts over 12 years. It is an interesting story, to be sure, but as the SNP was for decades before 2011, it is a Scottish story. 

A story with some little distance left to run, perhaps. Both Sturgeon and her lawyer are very keen to stress that she has not been found guilty of any wrongdoing herself, and that is important to note. But it does leave some puzzling questions, such as why the former First Minister was so incurious about the decade-long flow of luxury goods into the marital home, or what her bald husband was doing with luxury hairdryers. Or why she told the nation she was cooperating fully with the police when she actually spent seven hours offering “no comment”.

This is not the first time that Sturgeon has managed to avoid being formally implicated in a party scandal on the basis that she and Murrell, a husband-and-wife team in the two most senior positions of an extraordinarily centralised political party, maintained unusually strict Chinese walls not merely about party business (the line during the Alex Salmond scandal) but also, apparently, their household finances. Given the extent to which the SNP has made a concerted effort to co-opt Scottish civil society, that this posture has worked so often is perhaps grounds for some unease.

But had you said in 2021 that the police investigation would a) take five years and b) produce the result it did, we might have expected that to be bigger news: for Sturgeon, freed from the shadow of official investigation, to be free to resume her crusade against the Union at full power.

In the end, however, it doesn’t really matter, at least politically. Sturgeon is no longer first minister nor the darling of the nation; her self-pitying response to Murrell’s conviction has been met with derision. Not only does she no longer lead the Scottish Government, but she is not the sort of beloved grandee who might have been rolled out to turbo-charge an independence campaign. 

And if there is any larger political meaning to draw from this story, beyond the dangers of excessive central command-and-control inside a political party, it’s that Murrell at least never thought that was going to happen. The embezzled funds were drawn from a special fighting fund, for which the SNP had solicited explicit donations, earmarked for a second referendum. It made no sense to drain that fund, not merely politically but on basic not-getting-caught criminal logic, if you expected that referendum to actually take place.

The Scottish National Party still runs the Scottish Government. It retains, for now at least, most of Scotland’s seats in Westminster. We remain a very long way from the restoration of a truly national British politics, and nationalists in command of devolved institutions can still practice their slow-and-steady erosion of the ties that bind this country together.

But despite being led by two generational political talents in succession, despite a referendum on absurdly favourable terms handed to them by a British political establishment which hardly believes long-term victory to be actually possible, despite all the real chaos and alleged provocation of Brexit, the SNP couldn’t get independence over the line. 

Independence provides Scottish politics with a dividing line entirely divorced from practical questions of governance

Yet the window of opportunity generated by Brexit, to whatever extent it really existed, is now closed, and those generational talents are discredited or dead. A tired Nationalist administration is flirting with measures, such as fixing food prices, which will further undermine the Scottish economy and make the practical hurdles to separation all the greater. Independence provides Scottish politics with a dividing line entirely divorced from practical questions of governance, but nobody is really interested in litigating independence itself.

Salmond and Sturgeon thought they would deliver an independent Scotland. Their legacy may well amount to a second Northern Ireland.