Wings Over Scotland | The Final Robbery

So there it is. We did tell you so.

There will be no trial, no cross-examination, no explanation. The people of Scotland, the members and supporters of the SNP, the wider Yes movement, none of us will ever know what really happened.

Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

We’ll never find out how this could happen, for example.

But there we go. It’s more than six years now since Wings Over Scotland broke the story that hundreds of thousands of pounds were missing from the SNP’s accounts.

(Though so innocent were we at the time that we thought they’d at least been embezzled to be spent on the party’s political campaigning or paying off its debts.)

It’s more than five years since Wings exclusively broke the story that three members of the SNP’s Finance Committee had resigned after Murrell refused to let them examine the accounts to look for the missing cash.

And since Nicola Sturgeon issued a dire warning to the rest of the NEC not to ask any awkward questions about the missing money or else.

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And almost five years since then-SNP President Mike Russell furiously insisted that there was no money missing at all.

It’s also more than five years since we told you (the following month) that the police were officially investigating our discovery.

And since Scotland’s media jeeringly rubbished the story.

It’s now more than three years since Murrell, Sturgeon and the SNP’s former treasurer Colin Beattie were arrested in connection with the missing money.

And it’s more than three years since Murrell’s successor as CEO of the SNP, and former Daily Record editor, Murray Foote predicted that the investigation would result in no charges.

It’s a little under three years since the former editor of Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, Richard Walker, said it was all a lot of fuss over nothing and probably some sort of dastardly Unionist conspiracy.

Everyone whose job it was to tell you the truth lied to you. Except us.

David Leask, may the good Lord bless him, still insists he was right.

And now some small measure of justice been served, too little and too late. Murrell’s thieving left the SNP crippled and all but bankrupt, the “ring-fenced referendum fund” lost forever, the independence movement a broken shell, the greatest chance there’ll ever be of securing Scotland’s nationhood blown in a reign of squalid petty theft, and we won’t even get to know how it happened as his rich still-wife, somehow ignorant of it all even as the shiny fruits of Murrell’s deception piled up in her kitchen, saunters off into the sunset, laughing at all the gullible suckers she left behind.

It’ll be interesting to see what sentence Murrell’s guilty plea – which spares Sturgeon her usual turn as a forgetful witness – gets him. We know Natalie McGarry got almost two years for embezzling £25,000 in very similar circumstances, so one would like to think that swindling 16 times as much would result in a significantly stiffer term.

But Scotland is so crooked after almost a decade with Mr and Mrs Murrell and their loyal appointees in charge that we’re not getting our hopes up.

The final vindication is of course nice. But ultimately, readers, this is, and now always will be, an untold story.

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In every possible way, from start to finish, you got swindled.