Politics
Wings Over Scotland | Up The Hill And Down The Slope
On Sunday, Nicola Sturgeon told Laura Kuenssberg that the SNP’s accounts “went up and down” as her excuse for not noticing that hundreds of pounds had suddenly vanished from them.
Several things leap out immediately from that clip.
One, there very much WAS “something glaringly suspicious in the accounts that I should have seen” – the party had raised almost £700,000 in two “ring-fenced” fundraisers that wasn’t there any more, which ought to have made its leader at least mildly curious.
And two, attempting to fob responsibility off onto the independent auditors simply won’t wash. It’s not their job to determine whether the SNP has kept its political promises or not, their job is simply to match up money coming in against money going out and produce a set of numbers to show what it all adds up to. It makes no odds to them if it was spent on a party conference, a fancy motorhome or a 50-foot golden statue of Danny La Rue. All they can see is numbers.
(In any event the party’s longstanding auditors resigned in 2023 rather than risk being caught up in any more dodginess. It took months for the SNP to find anyone else willing to take the job on.)
But even leaving those things aside, if we’re going to learn anything about how The Great Indyref Swindle got to this calamitous point unchecked we need to examine just how hard Nicola Sturgeon had to look the other way to fail to see what was going on literally under her nose and literally in her own back yard.
(You’ll have to forgive us a bit of repetition in this piece, readers, because this is the full story of Operation Branchform with all the dots joined up for the first time ever anywhere. If some of it is a little familiar, just bear with us.)
Let’s start with 2015, the first year that Sturgeon started as SNP leader. Since we’re mainly concerned with events from 2017 onwards, we’ll just skip through the first couple quickly for background.
Sturgeon inherited a very healthy party from Alex Salmond. Even after fighting the 2015 election the SNP had over £400,000 in the bank, and a recently-quadrupled membership that would bring it millions of pounds in additional funding every year.
(For perspective, 2013 – Salmond’s last full year – saw the party receive £585,691 in membership income. For Sturgeon’s first full year the figure was £2,743,413 – almost five times as much. She was in charge of a golden goose.)
2016 was also an election year, and having spend a colossal £2.4m on the election campaign (£800,000 more than the previous Scottish election, and £600,000 more than on the 2015 Westminster campaign), only to lose Salmond’s groundbreaking majority at Holyrood, the bank balance plunged accordingly.
And here’s where we really come in. With Theresa May’s snap UK election meaning that the SNP had had to run four big national campaigns in four years, the coffers were understandably almost depleted.
But just a minute. 2017 was also the year of the “ref.scot” fundraiser, which made £482,000 and which the SNP angrily swore had NOT been spent on the election.
So where was it?
Readers may note that the accounts list “Fundraising income” and general “Donations” to the party separately, and the amounts are such that the ref.scot cash must be in the latter category. But it’s fairly academic anyway, as the money was all just dumped in the same pot – the SNP only has one bank account.
The 2017 accounts make clear that there’d also been a large debt repayment.
And we know exactly what it was – £500,000 had been returned to Chris and Colin Weir, specifically £250,000 each. (The other £100K was another separate loan from the Weirs, and would be repaid in March 2018.)
The Weirs had loaned the party £1 million in March 2016 to fight the forthcoming Holyrood election, the day after the SNP had launched the “ref.scot” fundraiser to create a “ring-fenced” independence referendum campaign fund.
Half of it had been paid back in 2016. The £1m of total loans from the Weirs is shown in the 2016 accounts, as is the £500,000 first half of the repayments (plus another £8,126 of other loans).
And the December 2017 repayment was the outstanding balance.
(The Electoral Commission website lists the repayment date of each loan as 1 December 2017 because that’s when each was fully repaid. It makes matters seem more complicated than they really are – in 2016 the party paid each of the two Weirs HALF of their loan back, rather than paying back, say, Chris’s in 2016 and Colin’s in 2017. They did the same the following year. So each loan – Chris’s £500,000 and Colin’s £500,000 – wasn’t considered as cleared until the second halves were paid back in 2017.)
So while you could argue the toss about whether the money had been spent on the election campaign or on paying back the Weirs, it was a pretty moot point since it all came from the same bank account – what matters is that it definitely HAD been spent.
2018 was the first year in five when there hadn’t been a referendum or a general election to spend money on, so the SNP’s funds got a hefty boost. It should be noted that this WASN’T fundraiser money, though, because there was no fundraiser in 2018, and in any case it wasn’t enough – it was £71,000 short of the amount the ref.scot appeal had collected. It was simply the bounty from the huge membership.
Still, if you were the SNP leadership there now seemed a very good chance that the difference could be made up next year, in which there was also no scheduled election, so that all the missing money would be back in the bank before anyone noticed and they’d have gotten away with it all.
But at that moment Boris Johnson – with, astonishingly, the enthusiastic help of the SNP – threw a whacking great spanner right into the works.
Strangely, when it came to the vote no SNP MPs actually voted for the second snap election in two and a half years. Angus MacNeil voted against and the rest abstained or were absent. Perhaps the leadership had realised the ramifications and panicked, but by then it was too late and the vote carried by 439 to 22, effectively sealing the party’s financial fate there and then.
Because 2019 was the year things got really murky.
You’ll remember from 2017 that the ref.scot fundraiser income was actually listed on the accounts under “Donations” rather than “Fundraising income, and the same appears to apply in 2019, because receipts from the latter are only £35,000 higher than in 2018 (when there was no special fundraiser) even though the yes.scot one launched in April of 2019 is known to have generated around £185,000.
(We know this because Colin Beattie confirmed in 2021 that the total raised was just short of £667,000 and the ref.scot total of £482,000 was publicly visible, leaving £185,000 to have come from the yes.scot appeal.)
Yet having raised £667,000 in “ring-fenced” funds for a referendum campaign and a booklet, which it by definition wasn’t allowed to spend on anything else, and having produced neither thing, the SNP only had £97,000 left in the bank.
Nicola Sturgeon tells us now that she did not find that fact “glaringly suspicious”, and the only reasonable explanation for that is that she already knew she’d broken her promises and spent the money, and therefore had no expectation of the money being there and wasn’t at all shocked when it wasn’t.
But even when we know that the 2017 fundraiser proceeds were actually used to pay off the Weirs, the SNP should at least have had the £185,000 from spring 2019 still in the bank at the end of the year, yet it had barely over half that sum.
Inescapably, half of the “ring-fenced” money had once again been spent on general SNP business, not the thing it was expressly and specifically solicited for. And under Scots law that is, unambiguously, a serious crime.
We’re told that the specialist fraud detectives from the Scottish Crime Campus at Gartcosh were furious from when the Crown Office declined to prosecute Sturgeon despite her refusing to answer their questions for seven hours, but we don’t know whether it was in relation to the missing fundraiser money, or suspected complicity in Murrell’s embezzlement (or both, or something else).
We can understand their anger.
With no general election in 2020, the SNP’s bank balance recovered to the point where the £185,000 from the yes.scot campaign had effectively been replaced.
However, the “Household Guide” still failed to appear.
(We passingly interject at this point that in Wings’ opinion, the “Household Guide” campaign was a cynical attempt to piggyback on the popularity of our own “Wee Blue Book” from 2014, which has been much-imitated since.)
The party did however purchase £615,270 of what it listed as “tangible investment assets” that year – an almost ninefold increase on the previous year.
It can be deduced from the accounts that the sum is in fact the total of the amounts spent on new office furniture and computer equipment, which tally to exactly £615,270. Let’s just keep that figure in mind for a while.
Remarkably, it’s more than the combined total spend on the same things (£496,652) during the entire other eight years of Sturgeon and Murrell’s joint reign combined.
It may or may not be coincidence that 2020 was the peak year of Peter Murrell’s embezzlement, in which he’s now admitted to stealing over £150,000 from party funds.
Wings noted at the time that these sums seemed astronomical, and it now looks very much as though the figures may have been artifically inflated in a crude attempt to disguise how much money Murrell was stealing.
In the most recent 2024 accounts, the figure is just £3,038.
By the time the 2021 accounts were published in August 2022, the cat was firmly out of the bag. Operation Branchform had been under way for just over a year.
(Incidentally exposing the lie of Nicola Sturgeon’s assertions to Laura Kuenssberg that she couldn’t respond to concerns about finances from the NEC because there was a live police inquiry. There simply wasn’t. Her notorious video telling the NEC to shut their faces was in March 2021, but the police didn’t open any sort of inquiry until that April, and did not escalate it into a full-scale investigation until July, by which time John Swinney had already, in May, reassured viewers of The Sunday Show that there was “a huge amount of scrutiny of party finances” within the SNP “day and daily”.)
After paying for yet another election campaign (£1.65m this time), the party’s reserves were back down below the level of the yes.scot fundraiser, at just £145,000. The “Household Guide” had still not been published (and indeed still hasn’t).
Despite 2022 having no general election, the accounts took another £100,000 hit – in itself a significant red flag for a party still trousering £2.3m in membership fees alone – leaving just over £48,000 in the bank.
Nicola Sturgeon resigned as party leader in February 2021 and Peter Murrell followed suit as chief executive a month later, though ostensibly for misleading communications chief Murray Foote over membership figures.
So the finances for the Sturgeon/Murrell reign look like this.
At no point during their eight full years in charge did the SNP have as much money in the bank as even the 2017 “ring-fenced” fundraiser brought in. (Though of course that’s fair enough in 2015 and 2016, as it hadn’t happened yet.)
No referendum happened and no “Household Guide” was published, so unless both of those fundraisers were deliberately and knowingly fraudulent (SPOILER: they were), the full £667,000 ought still to be there.
Yet at least £619,000 of it – 93% – has unarguably disappeared. It has never been identified or in any way accounted for in the books. It is not there, and nobody has ever answered for its absence. To this day, Nicola Sturgeon insists there is no “missing money”, as have a string of other senior SNP office-holders.
(Though in June 2021 Colin Beattie did grudgingly admit that just under £52,000 of it had been spent on unspecified “campaigning”.)
Sturgeon even tried to deflect by telling the quite audaciously false flat-out lie that the discrepancy was explained by the fact that the SNP’s accounts were managed on a cash-flow basis rather than the alternative, less transparent “accruals” method. But the SNP’s accounts have been done on the accruals basis for decades, and still are.
Peter Murrell embezzled around £340,000 from the party from 2017-2022 inclusive. Even if we notionally attribute every single penny of it as having come from the fundraisers (which is a nonsensical idea as there was only one pot of SNP money), that still leaves an almost identical sum – £327,000 – as having been separately stolen from the “Independence Referendum Campaign Fund” (sometimes the “Referendum Appeal Fund”) that the SNP was still soliciting donations for as recently as the summer of 2020, and which can only have been deliberately and knowingly stolen by the rest of the SNP leadership, not embezzled by Murrell.
Yet inexplicably both the Crown Office and the SNP alike appear to think this is no big deal, and not something that anyone should bother asking any more questions about – even though, as noted above, the crime has already been admitted to by the party’s former treasurer and, as recently as yesterday, by a pompous dim-witted oaf of a former MP and one-time broadcaster who’s – incredibly – being sent out to do the media rounds and blithely insist that there’s nothing to see here.
(Curiously, the Scottish media has no apparent interest in having the story explained by the only journalist who’s been on it for six and a half years.)
But you can’t steal from people and then just give them a vague IOU and pretend that makes it alright, especially when you simply don’t have the money to make good on that IOU. The SNP has only once in its entire history had £667,000 in the bank (the end of 2011, when it had slightly over £1m in cash reserves – the previous year it had just £1,241). At present it’s £619,000 short and hovering on the brink of bankruptcy.
(And in the wildly unlikely event that Keir Starmer agreed to Swinney’s demand for a second indyref tomorrow, what sort of criminally reckless organisation would lend the SNP 600 grand to refill the pot, or extend it an overdraft facility of that size? With membership in freefall and donations almost non-existent they’d have next to zero chance of ever getting it repaid.)
Not only is the fundraiser money gone, it ain’t ever coming back – despite Ian Blackford’s assurances to the Commons in November 2021. (In which, interestingly, he made it very explicit that the stolen money hadn’t only come from SNP members, shattering the lie that John Nicolson is telling everyone in the media who’ll listen.)
It is, however, a remarkable coincidence that that £619,000 is almost the exact same amount as the party supposedly spent on office furniture and computer equipment in 2020, Murrell’s peak year of embezzling. If those particular numbers were (as we strongly suspect is the case) mostly fiddled to try to hide his super shopping spree, they effectively kiboshed the SNP’s only chance of ever replacing the stolen fundraiser cash. One crime exposed the other.
The suicidal hubris of the SNP in demanding another snap UK election in 2019 was the other big blunder that buried them inextricably in the hole they’d dug themselves. Wings, of course, had tried to warn them.
Fighting that election cost the SNP £1.6m, for precious little benefit.
So you can take your pick, really. The SNP’s finances do indeed go up and down, although there’s been a lot more down than up recently. But even so, long after spending the fundraiser money they still had, and squandered, multiple chances to escape the clutches of Operation Branchform. (Chance-squandering seems to be Sturgeon’s main political speciality.)
They could have stopped the 2019 election, which dealt a hammer blow to their bank balance, by doing a deal with the Tories to pass a soft Brexit – as this site repeatedly suggested – and they might well even have managed to negotiate a second indyref as part of the deal. Even if not, they’d at least have saved themselves a fortune.
(They’re very unlikely to ever get a better chance to exert some leverage rather than just fruitlessly begging for another Section 30, certainly. Johnson was on the ropes and desperate for the escape route of an election.)
Or Nicola Sturgeon could have paid some attention to all the people warning her about the party’s finances – again prominently including this site – and thereby might have stopped Murrell splurging two thirds of a million pounds on possibly-imaginary office chairs and laptops to try to cover his tracks.
Either one would have left the coffers healthy enough to replace the missing fundraiser money long before Sean Clerkin filed his fateful complaint with the police, and none of the traumatic events of the last half-decade would have happened.
But Sturgeon couldn’t bear listening to anyone else’s advice, and now her husband’s in jail and she’s a broken figure of mockery and contempt, who’ll be looking nervously over her shoulder for years to come in fear that her sins will catch up with her one way or another.
Her ups are over and she’s looking at nothing but slope for the rest of her life. With a fat Holyrood pension she’ll have plenty money to keep her company, of course, even after she’s had to give all Murrell’s little presents back – unless she wants to join him in prison for reset – and her house has been sold to pay his debts. (He’ll also be entitled to a fair chunk of her wealth in the divorce, assuming they ever get round to it.)
At least she won’t miss the kitchen, which she was apparently never in. But with any luck, and certainly if we’ve got any say in the matter, there’s still plenty of heat coming the way of the great betrayer.
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