Severin Carrell

So much of the stuff she would never have known had arrived.

And we also discovered, as the indictment implied, that a lot of the material was actually being sent to family members.

I mean, the man earned £107,000 a year.

And so naturally, they would have thought, OK, he can afford this.

Uncle Peter's a really nice guy.

The reason the police began the investigation had nothing to do with Peter Murrell allegedly embezzling anything.

It was because a major crisis had arisen over the apparent disappearance of more than £600,000 which had been raised from party members and from Yes campaigners to ostensibly fund a second independence referendum.

In late 2020, the first questions began to emerge about what had happened to this missing £600,000.

This money was not appearing in the SNP's official accounts.

But then it emerged that actually some of the money was being spent on SNP election campaigns.

Party treasurers were stepping down, claiming that they hadn't been given access to the party accounts.

And this whole crisis also became a proxy for the battle going on inside the SNP between people that wanted to unseat Nicola Sturgeon, who were critical and very unhappy with her positions, her policies around trans rights, her positions on Nazi oil and gas, or her general drift to the progressive left.

And that's part of the reason she became so...

that she felt that her critics were weaponising one particular issue in order to conduct a wider war against her leadership of the party.

Yeah, and that actually is quite an important precursor to what we're witnessing now, because the question arises as to why...

Nicholas Sturgeon, in two very, very significant crises and scandals, appeared to be none the wiser.

We as journalists had been hearing rumours that Alex Salmond had been having extramarital affairs and there were even questions about whether he had been guilty of some kind of sexual misconduct or misdemeanours.

Those had been the stuff of political gossip for decades.

And Nicola Sturgeon denied any knowledge of those whatsoever.

And for many people, that just stretched credulity, given the closeness of their relationship that Nicola Sturgeon had been mentored by Alex Salmond.