Why did Peter Murrell turn to crime? The key question that still hangs over Sturgeon and Swinney

Behind headlines about two-and-a-half grand cruet sets, solid-silver wine coasters, and a 24-foot motorhome that SIMPLY COULD NOT BE SEEN, lies a story of incredible negligence by those at the most senior level of Scotland’s party of government.

Living in self-imposed exile in London and flanked by her lawyer, Aamer Anwar, during recent media appearances, Sturgeon has washed her hands of the matter. Neither the SNP nor Scotland is of use to the former First Minister any longer.

Instead, John Swinney is caught in the heart of a political scandal which might yet bring him down.

Thin-skinned and quick to anger, the First Minister has squirmed and raged through the past two weeks, furiously denouncing anyone who dares suggest that he, the man who hired his old friend Murrell, bears any responsibility for the culture of secrecy and denial in the SNP that allowed these crimes to go undetected.

There is more pain to come for the FM.

Not only is Swinney weakened, but Murrell’s sentencing hearing on June 23, during which a plea in mitigation will be heard, stands to make things worse.

More than anyone in Scotland right now, John Swinney must be wondering what the hell his old pal’s going to say.

The who, what, where, and when of the Murrell scandal have been well rehearsed, but retain their power to dumbfound.

The husband of the then First Minister embezzling hundreds of thousands of pounds of SNP members’ money which he spent filling the home they shared with luxury goods for more than a decade is – much as Sturgeon’s few remaining acolytes might dearly wish otherwise – a political scandal of unprecedented proportions in Scotland.

But, while we now have have a clear picture of much of Murrell’s case, the why of it all remains a mystery. Of sorts, anyway.

On the face of things, the crimes of the former SNP chief executive are simply baffling. Why would one half of a couple with joint earnings of more than a quarter-of-a-million-a-year need to steal to fund an extremely comfortable lifestyle? Why would a man with so much to lose be so utterly reckless? How could any husband heap upon his wife such public humiliation?

The plea in mitigation offered on behalf of his client by Murrell’s KC when he returns to Edinburgh High Court for sentencing on June 23 – along with the contents of pre-sentence reports – should provide some answers.

None of us can peek into the soul of another. What specific thing it was – what trigger, what spasm – that turned this seemingly placid, rather drippy man into a prolific embezzler is known only to him. And it may be that even Murrell, himself, cannot yet identify it.

But what some of us – men – might be able to understand are some of the patterns in Murrell’s behaviour. We might even, if we are honest, admit to understanding the way in which he lost control.

Men who do terrible things, whether those things are dishonest or violent, are made of the same stuff as other men. The engines that propel them are entirely masculine.

From where I sit, Peter Murrell looks like another man who lost control of the beast that lives inside us all.

Let the post-modernists squawk their nonsense about the gendered soul until they’re hoarse, the truth remains that male characteristics are male characteristics.

There are lots of excellent features included in the default setting man, not least the drives to protect and provide.

But men are fragile machines and the wiring can easily get jumbled.

The overwhelming majority of crime is committed by men and, in case after case, the perpetrator was a perfectly normal one right up until the moment he was not.

There’s a tendency for some men to become aggressively defensive when asked to consider the possibility that there exists within us something dangerous.

At its worst, this denial ends up with men declaring themselves feminists.

No woman should ever trust a man who says he’s a feminist.

Nor, for that matter, should any women ever trust a man on the basis he has warned her never to trust a man who says he’s a feminist because another masculine characteristic is a tendency towards manipulating women and this can often be achieved by declaring one’s honour and one’s allyship.

When John Swinney lost his rag during First Minister’s Question Time, last week, snapping as soon as he felt his integrity being threatened, his was an entirely male-coded anger. It was the kind of rage which, in any other location, would have shocked onlookers into silence.

The last, faltering years of Nicola Sturgeon’s political career saw her clash with feminist campaigners who’d spent their lives working to protect women’s sex-based rights.

Her brain addled by incoherent gender ideology, the former First Minister demanded voters accept that anyone could not only magically change their sex but that this could be done simply on the say so of the individual.

Any woman, said Sturgeon, who rejected a man’s claim he had been born in the wrong body and that he was, in fact, a woman was a bigot, possibly even a racist.

The former First Minister has now had her own painful lesson in some of the worst male characteristics, the selfishness, the ego, the risk that we might spiral into grandiosity.

A few days after Murrell’s guilty plea, Sturgeon said she had been misled, lied to, and betrayed by a man.

I wonder when the irony of her situation will begin to dawn.

If, after everything she has described, Nicola Sturgeon still refuses to see that women should never simply accept a man for who he says he is, she’s beyond help.