Severin Carrell

No, we didn't.

It has to be stated from the beginning that Murrell was actually very, very private, generally.

The only insight into any prior knowledge about the fact that he may have actually been a thief was the disclosure after his guilty plea last Monday that he had allegedly stolen some money in the northeast of Scotland when he was working for Alex Salmond in the late 1980s.

So Alex Salmond, the former First Minister before Nicola Sturgeon.

There are different stories about what Salmond then did.

One person has been saying very recently that Salmond effectively sacked him from his job.

But what we do know is that Salmond did hush that affair up.

Salmond paid the money and Murrell continued working inside the SNP.

And one particular phrase came to light last week that he was known to some people as Magpie Murrell.

It may sound like I'm overstating it, but Peter Murrell was one of the most powerful people in British politics.

He had been the chief executive of the most successful and the most effective electoral machine since 2001.

And in partnership with Alex Salmond, particularly when Salmond became leader again in 2004, they were able to build a party machine effectively from scratch.

So the process of going from a minority party to a party in 2007, which had won more seats than any other party, it was a process that was actually run and controlled by Peter Murrell.

he was in charge of setting up all of the structures and the mechanisms that were used for the SMP's funding, the SMP's accounts, the SMP's office organisation.

And he was also the person, one assumes, that was appointing all the office staff that were helping him run the SMP machine.

And so when you get to a point of that level of authority and influence and power over an organisation that you basically built, and you're also married to the boss,

unfettered power.

One of the most revealing things that became clear in the indictment was that Murrell had been using the names of his own office staff to commit some of these frauds.

And these are people that had worked for him in a small team for years.

So he not only portrayed Sturgeon, he portrayed office staff that had shown enormous amount of loyalty for a party and for a boss that they believed in.