Magpie Murrell outed as twitcher, great warbling Sturgeon on endangered species list

“Watch the birdie!” That ancient admonition of photographers unexpectedly took on new life earlier this week when Peter Murrell, chief executive of the Scottish National Party and consort of President for Life Sturgeon, gave his virtual evidence (the term has never been more apt) to the inquiry into the Scottish government’s mishandling of the sexual offence charges against Alex Salmond.

Murrell was under interrogation via Zoom, on Monday, by the Holyrood Salmond inquiry, in the hope of clarifying certain inconsistencies in his earlier evidence. That hope was quickly dashed. Murrell version one had simply claimed he was not at his Glasgow home on 2 April, 2018 when Alex Salmond met the First Minister. Like Macavity, Murrell wasn’t there.

Murrell evidence, version two, was noticeably different. In that account, Murrell came home after a hard day’s slog at whatever an SNP CEO does (“Have ye got ma tea, wumman?” – or perhaps not), to find a meeting in progress under his domestic roof. The living room was peopled by Sturgeon’s chief of staff, Alex Salmond’s former chief of staff and Salmond’s legal adviser, while Salmond was closeted with Sturgeon in another room. According to early Murrell testimony, he believed the meeting was about government business because his wife “told me she couldn’t discuss the details” and he added: “When she says she can’t talk about something, that’s the end of it.”

Disingenuous chap that he is, it never occurred to Peter to wonder how a first minister who had demitted office four years previously, along with his erstwhile chief of staff and lawyer, could be participating in government business in 2018. But, as he testified, She Who Must Be Obeyed had made it clear it was a government meeting, so his was not to reason why.

But – here’s a funny thing – Nicola Sturgeon told the Scottish parliament the opposite, that it was a meeting on SNP party business: “Like other party leaders here, I have responsibilities as leader of my party and I took part in meetings in that capacity.” That provokes the obvious question: if it was a party meeting, why was her husband, the chief executive of the SNP, not included and why could the First Minister not talk about it to him? The plot thickened further when the Scottish government withheld relevant documents from the inquiry under “governmental privilege”.

So it is small wonder the inquiry members, or at least the minority of four opposition members, were anxious for Peter Murrell to throw some light on this contradictory situation when they questioned him last Monday. Asked what he knew in advance about the subject matter of the meeting, Murrrell replied: “It was limited to the fact that Alex was popping in; it could have been about anything and it wasn’t an unusual event so he was just popping in.”

It wasn’t an unusual event? Was Alex Salmond, the former First Minister, in the habit of “popping in”, from his home in Aberdeenshire to the incumbent First Minister’s house in Glasgow, to borrow a cup of sugar, or whatever? How many visits did he pay chez Sturgeon during her time in office? And how many of them occurred after he became aware of the allegations against him?

Some unhelpful member of the inquiry then put it to Murrell that he had lied when he told the committee under oath that he was not aware in advance about the planned meeting. “I wasn’t aware that the meeting was for a purpose.” Does Nicola Sturgeon often hold purposeless meetings? If the famous equivocation “It all depends what the meaning of ‘is’ is” had not already been appropriated by Bill Clinton, it might have seemed a likely candidate for Murrell’s arsenal of evasions. As he explained, regarding Salmond: “I just thought he was popping in for a chat about, you know, any, any matter.”

Quite. Pop goes the weasel. Imagine, if Boris Johnson or some other Tory were delivering himself of such disingenuous drivel, how hard the SNP and their media fellow travellers would come down on him: the deconstruction of the obvious mendacity, the mockery, the sceptical belly laughs. But being married to the SNP First Minster – or even possessing a humble party membership card – is a protected characteristic in Sturgeon’s one-party Scottish state. It remains to be seen how long that discipline will hold, before the dam bursts.

At one point in the Zoom interview, Labour’s Jackie Baillie noticed that Murrell’s eyes kept looking to the left of the screen. Her suspicions clearly aroused, she asked: “Is there anybody in the room with you?” Murrell can be relied on to produce a mind-boggling response and, on this occasion, he did not disappoint. “There’s a magpie,” he told her. “Actually, there’s two of them.” That was fortunate, on the old magpie adage “one for sorrow, two for joy.” The birds, it transpired, were not in the room, but in his garden.

This was a new departure. No one had previously characterised Murrell as a twitcher, but he certainly twitched energetically during the remainder of the interview. He also opened up a fresh line of inquiry with his equivocal reply to Baillie’s question whether there were any further text messages between him and senior SNP officials relating to complaints against Alex Salmond. In evidence version one, he had denied there were any. This time his response was: “You asked whether there was any relevant information and there wasn’t and there still isn’t.”

This was the micro-equivalent of the moment when Alexander Butterfield revealed to the Watergate inquiry the existence of a tape-recording system in the Oval Office. It suggested there were indeed further texts, but Murrell chose to deem them irrelevant. Like the text message he himself allegedly sent on 29 January, 2019, complaining that a party official was “not being forceful enough to achieve the objective” of getting someone to make a police statement against Alex Salmond. Murrell’s claim on Zoom that “again we’re drifting into an area where we are invading the privacy of someone we know already we have caused a great amount of stress to” opened a new can of worms.

This was taken as a reference to Sue Ruddick, SNP chief operating officer, who on the same day broke silence about her involvement in the messages to express her concern that the committee would demand the production of further texts, accusing it of being “determined to ignore complainers’ privacy rights”. She appears to be concerned about text messages, the existence of which was denied by Peter Murrell’s original sworn testimony. As with so many other issues, the tale has metamorphosed from texts being non-existent to their being embarrassing to a complainant. That is not a valid argument against the production of key evidence when a conspiracy to influence criminal proceedings has been alleged.

Murrell’s performance drew poor reviews, the consensus being that the two magpies, belonging to a notoriously dishonest species, were not the only dodgy characters at the far end of the camera:

“Mr Murrell has given false evidence to parliament under oath… I intend to write to the Crown Office to ask them to investigate the matter.” (Murdo Fraser, Conservative committee member)

“It is extraordinary that Mr Murrell may have exposed the false statements he previously gave to the committee by admitting the existence of other messages under questioning today… I trust that the Crown Office will fully investigate the possibility that Mr Murrell has made false statements to the committee.” (Jackie Baillie, Labour)

The star turn of the week, however, was supposed to be on the following day, when Alex Salmond was due to give evidence to the inquiry on Tuesday. He withdrew, however, because of the restrictions imposed on his evidence by the committee and its refusal to publish his submission of evidence, much of which has already been published in The Spectator. There is debate over whether that was a tactical error on Salmond’s part, since any evidence he might give via a future press conference would allegedly lack the gravitas of a Holyrood committee.

In fact, there is little gravitas about this or any other Holyrood committee. It is a toothless inquiry, controlled by a majority of SNP and Green members. This scandal is by now mired in highly credible claims of criminality and it demands a judge-led inquiry, with real power and the ability to subpoena material from government agencies. In most nations west of Turkmenistan an accumulating scandal on this scale would have brought down the government.

So far, the Scottish public has shown little interest (understandably, considering the health and economic preoccupations created by the pandemic) and the personality cult of Nicola Sturgeon – actually rooted in her mediocrity, cf. Angela Merkel – has anaesthetised the electorate. But that may not last forever. Next Tuesday it will be Sturgeon’s turn to give evidence. Even in the favourable ambience of an SNP-dominated committee, she faces the challenging task of squaring the circle of her own contradictory evidence and that of her associates.

Then Alex Salmond will have his say, in the wider forum of the media and public opinion. To say he is a man with a mission would be an understatement: he is trigger-happy and loaded for bear. Assembling the multifarious contradictions of all the evidence given by the Sturgeon camp would produce a jigsaw with few parts that fit together. The party line, as handed down by Sturgeon’s associates, is strictly for the birds. Despite formidable protection, the Great Warbling Sturgeon is now an endangered species.