GRAHAM GRANT: End of the street for Mr & Mrs SNP… whose stranglehold on the occasion left many deeply uneasy

Peter Murrell was once the most unsackable man in Scottish politics – well, it helped being married to the First Minister.

He was credited with helping to mastermind a string of election victories while chief executive of the SNP, a post he held for more than 20 years.

Nicola Sturgeon and her husband were the country’s premier power couple, and no dissent was tolerated.

In 2015 a formal ban was even imposed on Nationalist MPs speaking out against party policy. The obsession with ‘message discipline’ may have seemed a touch Stalinist to some. But there was no arguing with the results.

Back in 2015, the SNP secured a landslide general election victory, winning 56 out of 59 seats, less than a year after the defeat of the Yes campaign in the independence referendum of September 2014.

Fast forward to 2025 and the party is in a cash crisis as members desert in their droves in the aftermath of its catastrophic performance in last summer’s Westminster election – when the SNP’s vote share tumbled from 45 to 30 per cent, with the loss of 39 seats.

Ms Sturgeon’s social media post yesterday, revealing that her marriage is coming to an end, underlines the extent to which the SNP’s fortunes have shifted since the days when she and Mr Murrell called the shots and insisted on total obedience.

It came only a day after Alex Salmond’s widow, Moira, launched a thinly veiled attack on Ms Sturgeon, as she condemned those who she said were ‘determined to damage’ her husband’s reputation.

Mr Murrell had worked in Mr Salmond’s constituency office before ascending to the role of party chief executive. 

Those deep-rooted ties were torn apart in spectacular fashion after the Salmondgate affair, leading to a rift that would never be healed.

Two of the most formative relationships of Ms Sturgeon’s life were with powerbrokers who drove her on the path to political success. Both of them are now over.

It’s worth reflecting on the scale of the upheaval the SNP has experienced since Ms Sturgeon quit, paving the way for Humza Yousaf’s disaster-strewn tenure.

Under her leadership, there was at least a sense of direction, even if the final destination was failure, both for the independence project and a host of badly executed or abortive domestic reforms.

The showmanship of Mr Salmond is long gone, replaced by the plodding managerialism of John Swinney and a crew of familiar faces from the Sturgeon era around the Cabinet table – a mix of the clueless and the incompetent.

There’s no doubt that the unravelling of Ms Sturgeon’s marriage brings to an end an extraordinary partnership but perhaps the greatest surprise is that it endured for so long.

In the days when Ms Sturgeon could expect a rock-star welcome when she addressed activists and membership was in rude health, few dared to publicly question the Sturgeon- Murrell axis.

But there was always uneasiness among their critics over the notion of a married couple being at the helm of the entire party apparatus.

Mr Murrell enjoyed almost no public profile apart from the odd mention on his wife’s social media where he was portrayed as something of a put-upon homebody, cooking for his wife while she read novels – or arguing with her over decorating the Christmas tree.

That relative anonymity evaporated during the fallout from the Alex Salmond affair, when the former first minister, Ms Sturgeon’s erstwhile mentor, was accused of sexual harassment, triggering a botched internal probe.

Mr Salmond took the government he once led to court to challenge the investigation and won – costing taxpayers more than £500,000.

He was then brought to trial in 2020 on a series of sex charges including attempted rape, and acquitted, but he and his backers believed that the allegations were the result of a conspiracy led by supporters of Ms Sturgeon – something she fiercely denied.

Their friendship was destroyed and the party was plunged into civil war.

When he was a Nationalist MP, former justice secretary Kenny MacAskill called for Mr Murrell to be suspended after a copy of WhatsApp texts appeared to show him calling for pressure to be put on police investigating Mr Salmond.

Mr Murrell admitted sending them but later said he regretted the wording.

At the time, the long- running Salmond inquiry was well under way, which concluded Ms Sturgeon misled parliament about her knowledge of the claims against Mr Salmond, though another independent probe found otherwise (in a heavily redacted report).

The parliamentary investigation forced Mr Murrell into public view, and he was accused of being ‘obstructive’ in a surreal virtual appearance before MSPs in February 2021.

He was asked whether there was anyone else in the room with him at the time and explained he was looking at magpies. Mr Murrell sought to give the impression of a man who knew next to nothing about his wife’s business.

This was only a prelude, however, to the greater crisis of Operation Branchform, which must surely have put a massive strain on the marriage.

It was set up by Police Scotland to look into how more than £600,000 of crowdfunding was used by the party, and led to the arrests of Mr Murrell, Ms Sturgeon and former SNP treasurer Colin Beattie.

There have been no charges laid against Ms Sturgeon and Mr Beattie, though inquiries are ongoing, while Mr Murrell was charged with embezzlement last year.

A police file into the allegations, spanning a seven-year period, was handed to prosecutors in May.

He is accused of embezzling party funds related to incidents which are ‘said to have occurred between 2016 and 2023’.

Ms Sturgeon announced her intention to quit as first minister on February 15, 2023, just weeks before her husband was arrested.

She later insisted that her resignation was a ‘coincidence of timing’.

Images of a police tent outside Ms Sturgeon’s suburban home as officers conducted a wide-ranging search were screened on live television.

In a separate operation, officers took away a £110,000 campervan from outside the home of Mr Murrell’s mother in Dunfermline, Fife.

Mr Murrell quit as SNP chief executive in March 2023, after admitting he was responsible for misleading the media about plummeting party membership numbers and acknowledging that he had become a distraction to the leadership race.

He is now rarely seen in public, while Ms Sturgeon has focused on writing her memoir and book reviews (in between occasional trips to Holyrood).

The days of the seemingly unassailable Sturgeon/ Murrell hegemony are now a distant memory – but the seeds of its demise were sown long ago.