IN THE LAST WEEK OR SO, the Murrells have been the gift that keeps on giving, much as for twelve years party coffers were the gift he couldn’t resist. In these über-grim times, where there is no political or economic respite on the horizon, the list of items pilfered by Peter Murrell has provided the country with welcome merriment.
The tacky £2.6k Lalique salt and pepper grinders; £5k on Montblanc pens; seven kettles in four months; almost £6k on three high-end coffee machines, and of course the world’s most infamous campervan. It’s beginning to sound less like a charge sheet and more like a shopaholic’s version of the Twelve Days of Christmas: Twelve Years of Stealing.
And that’s without the items that didn’t make the charge sheet. Cue more mirth: Murrell stockpiled 108 Andrex toilet rolls just as his wife was warning Scots not to hoard in panic over an impending Covid lockdown. He also spent considerable sums on cosmetics and women’s underwear.
The schadenfreude at the fall from grace of Scotland’s pre-eminent power couple is all the sweeter because throughout her time in office Nicola Sturgeon laid claim to supreme moral virtue. Her political rhetoric dripped with sanctimony, despite the mock humility. She was nobler than other politicians, especially Westminster ones whom she was always ready to denounce, just as the SNP and Scotland more generally were deemed to be morally superior. Nationalists lapped up this mythology, as did much of the media, especially in London, for whom Sturgeon became a Scottish Obama.
What karma, then, that her husband sits in a Scottish prison, facing a lengthy sojourn at His Majesty’s pleasure, while Sturgeon has exiled herself to London, of all places, pleading her innocence via the SNP’s favourite lawyer and appearances at sympathetic book festivals. Her big set-piece interview with Laura Kuenssberg on the BBC on Sunday has been repeatedly compared to Prince Andrew’s ill-starred Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis.
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