Peter Murrell embezzlement inquiry would be a waste of time. Here's how the truth will out – John McLellan

I can’t quibble with Scotland’s most senior judge, until his retirement last year, and wisely, former SNP MP Joanna Cherry QC has stopped short of calling for a full public inquiry into the grand theft of SNP moolah by its disgraced ex-chief executive, Peter Murrell.

It may be an unpopular view but – apart from the understandable desire to see previously holier-than-thou SNP politicians wriggling on the spit of a parliamentary inquiry – the Roman tortoise of parroted party lines defending First Minister John Swinney’s position that there is nothing more to see suggests little will be gained from a probe by MSPs or MPs either.

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Absent witnesses

For a start, Fingers Murrell wouldn’t be available for cross-examination now he’s following Labour peer Mike ‘Blazing Curtains’ Watson ladling out the porridge from HMP Saughton’s kitchens or helping fellow prisoners with their numeracy homework.

The other star witness is now traipsing round book festivals and unlikely to appear before a panel of MSPs for whom Ms Sturgeon’s contempt was ill-disguised when under cross-examination for breaching the Ministerial Code in the wake of the Alex Salmond affair. If she had a decidedly dodgy memory then, as sure as Jura coffee machines cost over a grand, it would turn to unrecoverable mush in the unlikely event she agreed to give evidence.

As for the Commons Scottish Affairs Select Committee, I doubt the prospect of being held in contempt for refusing to testify would faze Ms Sturgeon. Those hazy days when the speculation was which United Nations commission the dear ex-leader would be asked to lead seem so far away.

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But, of course, that does not mean there are no questions to answer, and since Murrell pleaded guilty this week to relieving the nationalist cause of £400,000 to adorn his wife with the trappings of conspicuous consumption to which he thought they were entitled, we have turned into a nation of criminal psychologists and marriage guidance counsellors.

Why did he need to steal? Did he think he could get away with it for ever? Surely she must have known? Didn’t she ask questions about all those Montblanc pens and fancy hand bags? Was Murrell so clever and everyone else in the SNP so dumb that it was impossible to detect what he was up to?

John Swinney, ex-SNP treasurer Colin Beattie, Alyn Smith MSP on Debate Night, and all the other SNP figures desperate to limit the massive reputational damage to the party, cannot brush off the video of Ms Sturgeon aggressively haranguing the National Executive Committee (NEC) as more questions about SNP finances were leaking out.

Nor can they ignore the evidence of otherwise loyal Douglas Chapman and Roger Mullin, or the resignation of people like ex-Edinburgh Lord Provost Frank Ross, an accountant, as barriers were put in the way of transparent scrutiny, allegedly by ex-national convener Kirsten Oswald MSP. Now community safety minister, it’s not a good look to face accusations that her previous experience of law enforcement was as a ‘stooge’ imposing the SNP leadership’s rule on those uppity NEC members to prevent probing questions about the SNP’s finances.

READ MORE: Tory Shadow Scots Secretary backs calls for Westminster SNP embezzlement probe

Sturgeon: ‘no comment’

It’s entirely understandable that the opposition want a political hog roast, not least because of the sneering to which they were subjected throughout Ms Sturgeon’s tenure as First Minister. Conservative leader and former crime reporter Russell Findlay hit the bullseye in comparing her “no comment” responses in seven hours of police questioning to that of an organised criminal.

Rising to the bait to defend the police’s “gold-plated” investigation, her solicitor Aamer Anwar only made matters worse, especially as his high regard for the rozzers is at variance with his view of the officers in the Sheku Bayoh inquiry.

In the court of public opinion, those portraying the party and Ms Sturgeon as victims, are guilty of complicity in the cover-up of the alleged cover-up. Fortunately for the SNP, Murrell was able to hold on until after the election and now there are five years for the public memory to fade.

Although he’s a crook, there’s no reason to believe he’s not still loyal to the cause and although he must have known the game was up for some time, to have all this coming out as an election approached would have been catastrophic for the SNP. It looks like he’s played for time to kick it all beyond May 7, and having taken £400,000, he’s taken another one for the team to which he devoted his life while treating it as his personal piggy bank.

I don’t believe there has been a Crown Office conspiracy, but I can believe Murrell has sought some redemption by repaying the party with a guilty plea which spares his wife and Messrs Swinney, Beattie, Robertson, et al, a day’s grilling in the witness box.

However implausible, they can blame obvious failures of governance on one putrid apple in a barrel of beautiful fruit, but the stench of maladministration is everywhere and if, as I argued last week, now might not be a bad time for a referendum, the case just got stronger.

The truth will come out eventually, but not from stonewalling at a parliamentary committee, but through good old-fashioned investigative journalism. The slighted, ignored and ripped off will want revenge, witnesses will want their reputations protected, and the book will sell a lot more copies than Nicola Sturgeon’s (anything but) Frankly. It will need a good foot-in-the-door crime reporter. Someone like Russell Findlay.