Peter Murrell Jailed: The Fall of the SNP's Former Chief Executive

Peter Murrell, the former chief executive of the Scottish National Party, was sentenced on Tuesday to five years and three months in prison after pleading guilty to eight charges of embezzling a total of £459,000 over a period spanning thirteen years.

The sentence brings to a close one of the most consequential criminal cases in modern Scottish political history. Murrell, who ran the SNP's headquarters for more than two decades and is the husband of the former first minister Nicola Sturgeon, admitted offending that stretched from 2010 to 2023, covering almost the entire period of the party's rise to dominance at Holyrood.

The scale of the dishonesty was matched by its duration. Over thirteen years, £459,000 was embezzled across eight separate charges, a breach of trust committed from within the small circle that controlled the party's finances while it won election after election.

Because Murrell pleaded guilty, there was no trial and no need for the prosecution to prove its case before a jury. The court's task on Tuesday was confined to sentence: weighing the sum involved, the length of the offending, the position of trust from which it was committed and the fact of the guilty pleas themselves.

A fall from the centre of power

For two decades Murrell was one of the most powerful figures in Scottish politics, though rarely a public one. As chief executive he controlled the SNP's machinery, its money, its staffing and its campaigns, through the independence referendum, the party's near sweep of Scotland's Westminster seats and its long hold on Holyrood. The office he occupied made him the gatekeeper of the party's internal life, answerable to its elected leadership but possessed, in practice, of day to day control that few around him could check. His conviction means that the man who administered that success was, throughout much of it, stealing from the organisation he ran.

The political consequences arrive at a delicate moment for the SNP, which only last month secured its fifth consecutive election victory. The party has sought to separate its present from the era the case represents, and there is no suggestion that the offending extended beyond the charges to which Murrell pleaded guilty. Nonetheless, opposition parties have seized on the case as evidence of a culture of secrecy at the heart of the party's operations during its years of dominance.

Ms Sturgeon, who served as first minister from 2014 to 2023, has not been accused of any wrongdoing, and nothing in the case as presented in court has suggested otherwise.

On 10 June, a fortnight before sentencing, the Scottish Parliament rejected a call for a specific inquiry into Murrell, voting instead for a wider inquiry into the financing of political parties. That inquiry is now expected to examine how parties raise, hold and account for money, and what safeguards exist to detect wrongdoing by those trusted with the funds.

The inquiry to come

The wider inquiry now takes on a significance its sponsors could not have fully foreseen. It will examine the rules governing donations, loans and internal controls across all parties, and it will do so in the shadow of a case that demonstrated how completely those controls failed inside one of them. Its recommendations are expected to shape the rules under which the next Holyrood election is fought. For the parliament itself, the inquiry is also a test of whether an institution dominated for so long by one party can examine that party's affairs with the detachment the public will expect.

For the SNP, the immediate task is simpler and harder: to persuade voters that the party which won a fifth term last month is not the party whose chief executive spent thirteen years stealing from it. Sentencing closes the criminal case. The political reckoning will take longer.