Peter Murrell during Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee Ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, June 3, 2022. KIRSTY O’CONNOR / AP
Another blow to the Scottish Independence Party. Peter Murrell, 58, husband of ex-Prime Minister Nicola Sturgeon and executive director of the SNP since 1999, was found dead on Wednesday April 5 as part of an inquiry into the finances of the movement, which is still largely in the majority in Scotland arrested by the police. Mr Murrell was released without charge that evening but images of the pavilion he transformed with Ms Sturgeon in south Glasgow into a crime scene with police cordons and a tent set up in front of it dented the image a little more SNP. The latter has already suffered in the polls following the surprise resignation of Nicola Sturgeon, a formidable communicator, on February 15, and unprecedented divisions have emerged within her.
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Scottish police have been investigating a sum of £600,000 (€686,000) in donations to the SNP since 2021, which is believed to have been used to fund a second independence referendum – the first in 2014 retaining the UK won 55.3% of the vote. Police, who also raided the SNP’s Edinburgh headquarters on Wednesday, suspect the money was being used for something else – possibly the party’s day-to-day operations. There is also the issue of the loan of around £100,000 Mr Murrell gave to the SNP, which is said to have been experiencing liquidity problems.
The Independence Party’s finances have long raised questions, as has its management, which is seen as opaque and far too centralized. Nicola Sturgeon met Mr. Murrell in the late 1990s when both were rising stars in the SNP and were close to the movement’s leader at the time, Alex Salmond. They married in 2003 and remarried in 2010 when Peter Russell was already party leader and Nicola Sturgeon was Secretary of State in Scotland’s regional government. In late 2014, the politician succeeded Alex Salmond at the helm of the SNP and government, shortly after the failed independence referendum, but her husband retained the keys to the party.
So far, only a few internal voices had dared to criticize this curious way of working. Except for Joanna Cherry, an SNP MP who was expelled from the party in 2021 after questioning Ms Sturgeon’s strategy (including her gender change bill). “It’s not healthy for a married couple to unite the party leader and the government. And on the financial side [du SNP], it doesn’t smell good,” the BBC’s elected official said as Ms Sturgeon resigned. Tongues began to loosen during the campaign to remove the leader, with Mr Murrell being particularly pressured to resign in late March after hesitantly admitting that the SNP had lost 30% of its membership in a matter of months.
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