RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Even I am appalled at McPlod’s raid on Wee Burney
Peter Murrell, former chief executive of the Scottish National Party, has long had a fearsome reputation as the man who knows where the bodies are buried.
Who could have imagined, until now, that some of those bodies might be buried in his own garden?
How else to explain why police were carrying shovels at the back of his house this week? Were they looking for the near 50,000 SNP members who have gone missing over the past few years?
Murrell is, of course, the husband of former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, aka Wee Burney. Prior to her recent sudden resignation they were The Untouchables, Scotland’s power couple, with an iron grip on every aspect of political and public life north of the border.
Their castle came crashing down at 7.35am on Wednesday when Murrell was arrested at their home on an estate in Uddingston, near Glasgow.
RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Peter Murrell, former chief executive of the Scottish National Party, has long had a fearsome reputation as the man who knows where the bodies are buried. Who could have imagined, until now, that some of those bodies might be buried in his own garden? (Mr Murrell and Nicola Sturgeon are pictured in May last year)
Police remove a gazebo on Thursday from the home of Former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and her husband Peter Murrell, Former Chief Executive Officer of SNP
Murrell was taken into custody and questioned about alleged financial irregularities before being released without charge, pending further investigations.
Inquiries are said to centre on what happened to £660,000 raised for a second independence referendum and a £107,000 personal loan made to the party by Murrell to help with ‘cash flow’ problems.
Wee Burney has maintained all along that she knew nothing about the loan. But as I wrote on the day she resigned, her denial defied belief. If I gave someone 107 grand, Mrs Littlejohn might just notice.
‘Tesco declined our credit card today. Went to the hole in the wall and there was £107,000 missing. Any idea where it’s gone?’
I concluded: ‘My best guess is that Taggart and Rebus are already on the case.’
Mystic Uncle Rich strikes again.
It turns out that McPlod had been looking into the missing money since March 2021. But it wasn’t until this week that they decided to arrest and interview the man at the centre of the mystery.
And, boy, did they make a meal of it. Vanloads of cops turned up at the house at the crack of dawn, quickly erecting a crime scene tent in the front garden.
You half-expected Taggart’s Detective Inspector Jackie Reid to emerge from the tent and announce:
‘There’s binna murrdurr.’
It was the kind of operation normally associated with the anti-terror squad, or a search for victims of a serial killer. Talk about over the top.
For the record, as regular readers will be well aware, this column has nothing but contempt for Sturgeon and all her works, aided and abetted by Murrell, who has been the SNP’s chief exec since 1999.
Wee Burney is a tinpot tyrant, whose stock-in-trade has been stirring up anti-English hatred, grievance and division, while presiding over a failed state.
Her repeated claim that she had no idea her husband was about to be arrested when she announced her surprise decision to quit also stretches credulity to breaking point. I’ll leave that, and the political implications for Scotland and the independence campaign, to others better qualified than me to ponder.
Yes, I can understand why some people are rejoicing at the spectacular downfall of the couple, culminating in this week’s high-profile arrest. Unionists, who for years have been roundly abused, vilified and threatened by Sturgeon’s cowardly Cybernats, can be forgiven for cracking open a bottle or two of Glennhoddle single malt.
But just because you can’t stand somebody, viscerally oppose what they represent and long for their comeuppance, it doesn’t mean they are not entitled to the presumption of innocence.
What I want to concentrate on, for now, is the behaviour of the police. For two years, since the allegations around Murrell emerged, they have done little or nothing. Yet within a few short weeks of Sturgeon resigning as First Minister, they suddenly decide to swing into action with a vengeance.
If they thought Murrell had questions to answer, he could have been invited to attend an interview with his solicitor. This is, after all, an investigation into alleged missing donations to a political party, not an armed robbery.
There was absolutely no justification for staging a heavy-handed dawn raid, as if he was a County Lines mastermind or an Albanian arms dealer.
As Krissy Storrar reported in yesterday’s Scottish Daily Mail, dozens of officers were involved, carrying spades and tarpaulin sheets, hauling away boxes of ‘evidence’, even searching a barbecue grill at one stage. Some of them had riot shields.
They searched the house from top to bottom, looking for what exactly? No doubt they also trawled through Nicola’s knicker drawer. CSI-style crime scene tape sealed off the property as burly, grim-faced McPlods in ubiquitous hi-viz jackets stood guard.
Yesterday morning, there were still 20 coppers on the scene. Doing what, precisely?
This is Two Doors Down country, not Mar-a-Lago.
Police Scotland seem to have taken their cue from the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s compound in Palm Beach, Florida, last summer.
Welcome to Mac-a-Lago.
Unfortunately, this outrageous abuse of power is not limited to the Feds in the U.S. In recent years, it has become standard operating procedure in Britain, especially in the Met.
The dawn raid, the ransacking of suspects’ homes on the flimsiest of pretexts, is the British police’s equivalent of the American ‘perp walk’ — where the alleged perpetrator is paraded before the cameras to establish an impression of guilt.
We’ve seen it time and again deployed by the Met during the disgraceful, bungled investigations into innocent journalists, celebrities and politicians accused of an assortment of ‘historic’ crimes.
Nicola Sturgeon with her new husband Peter Murrell are pictured following their wedding service at the Oran Mor in Glasgow in 2010
Police remain outside the home of Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell on Thursday
Arrest first, ask questions later was the common modus operandi in all the inquiries into everything from phone-hacking to the so-called Paedos In High Places scandal.
Who can forget, without revulsion, the shocking treatment of the blameless 92-year-old war hero Lord Bramall, whose home was turned over as if he was a common criminal. Or the high-profile raids on the homes of Cliff Richard and Jimmy Tarbuck, without a shred of credible evidence.
Now McPlod are getting in on the act, too. After years of acting as Wee Burney’s private army and ruthlessly enforcing to the letter her burgeoning catalogue of exciting new ‘hate’ crimes, they are biting the hand that fed them for so long.
We can only speculate as to the motivation behind the decision to mount a mob-handed, early morning assault on Murrell and Sturgeon’s sleepy ‘DunGuvnin’.
We might also ask where Police Scotland managed to rustle up a couple of dozen coppers for such an operation, when they’ve lost 1,000 officers, closed 140 police stations, and thousands of heinous crimes — from rapes to drug dealing — remain unsolved. Why is this case such a priority?
Of course, they must investigate every complaint without fear or favour, even if it involves the chief executive of the ruling political party, who just happens to be married to the recently departed First Minister.
But this is an investigation into alleged financial irregularity, not a violent crime. I can see they might want to examine Murrell’s laptop and, perhaps, his bank statements. But just what did they expect to find in the barbecue grill, or under the geraniums in the back garden? A few hundred grand in used notes? A signed confession?
Even diehard Unionists should hesitate before celebrating Murrell’s arrest and Wee Burney’s embarrassment. When the law becomes involved in politics, it is a slippery slope. If the former First Minister and her husband, a prominent figure in Scottish politics for more than two decades, can be subjected to this kind of humiliating treatment, no one is safe.
Look at the demeaning circus in the U.S., where Trump is currently being hung out to dry over alleged financial wrongdoings. Even some of his sworn opponents are rightly horrified.
I repeat, Murrell has been released without charge, even though investigations are continuing.
Whatever you think of his politics, and of his wife’s behaviour as First Minister, he is entitled to due process — not a show trial in the court of public opinion, courtesy of Police Scotland.
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