Severin Carrell

And if you wanted to take a positive slant on that, the only conclusion one would draw is that people that knew

about these rumors about Salmon's conduct or knew of the specific allegations, had made a deliberate decision to withhold that information from Nicola Sturgeon in order to avoid poisoning their relationship or in order to avoid giving her knowledge of something that they were helping to conceal.

And that actually is the most serious issue of all, is you have...

a political party, an organisation where lots of difficult and damaging issues aren't being surfaced and aired because the overriding motivation amongst people in the SNP hierarchy is to protect the brand and protect the cause.

The brand is the SNP, the cause is seeking Scottish independence.

Everything else is either secondary or just noise.

And that's partly, I believe,

why Nicola Sturgeon and why the SNP are in the position they're in now.

The most important thing to remember about the two greatest crises that Sturgeon has to weather as First Minister, the Salmond sexual misconduct crisis and the moral crisis, is that with Salmond,

There was so much evidence and, in fact, testimony that people in the government and SNP apparatus knew about the allegations against Salmond.

And they often chose not to tell Nicola Sturgeon about what they knew.

The moral affair is in a different category because it seems abundantly clear there was no inkling or evidence at all until the police stumbled across some sort of moment of revelation during their investigation into the £600,000 that had gone missing, that in fact their inquiry was actually about embezzlement.

It wasn't about misappropriated funding.

but only Murrell has been charged.

And there is no evidence that anybody else was complicit in this.

There is no evidence that anybody knew and covered it up.

Sturgeon has been investigated, interviewed, cleared.

Everybody involved in you, Murrell, have just genuinely struggled to understand how this happened under their noses.

I think many of us expect he's going to be given a custodial sentence, a term of imprisonment.

And even though this was a first offence,