Meeting of the Parliament 10 June 2026 [Draft]
The key and absolute qualification for any First Minister of Scotland is that
“that individual must be able to command the trust of the Parliament and the public.”—[Official Report, 28 November 2001; c 4118.]
Those are not my words but those of John Swinney and, on that point, we are in complete agreement.
However, we have just come out of an election in which only half of Scots voted. I say this to SNP members who say that this debate is simply a distraction and that we should get on with delivery: we need trust and transparency as foundations in this Parliament in order to do exactly that.
Trust in politics feels like it is at an all-time low, but the revelations over the past few weeks mean that that trust has been further undermined. The story of Peter Murrell embezzling more than £400,000 from the SNP is, frankly, one of the biggest scandals of the devolution era. SNP speakers’ repeated attempts at deflection today have been embarrassing, because winning an election is not justification for covering up stealing £400,000.
This story is fundamentally about power and trust, and it has implications for all of us in this Parliament. Willie Rennie is right: there might well be personal tragedies in all of this, but this is about professional failure. People believe that this is corruption at the highest level. If this was just a crime conducted by the most senior officer of the SNP—the governing party in Scotland—that would be bad enough, but, at the time, this was the husband of the former First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, and the childhood friend of the current First Minister, John Swinney, who appointed him to his role. In that context, it is simply not credible for John Swinney to say, “There is nothing to see here. Trust me.”
The First Minister says that, because there has been a police investigation, there is no need for a parliamentary inquiry. Let me reassure John Swinney that I have nothing but admiration for the police and have no intention of marking their homework, but the police themselves are not happy. Wider questions arise from this, and I will set them out shortly. Contrary to what John Swinney seems to think, I am clear that it is not for me or this Parliament to consider the internal financial operation of the SNP. It is a matter for the SNP itself.
I gently suggest to the First Minister that there is much merit in Alex Neil’s suggestion of asking an independent KC to examine the governance arrangements, both then and now, so that he can satisfy himself that robust arrangements are in place. The First Minister’s so-called governance review was pretty thin.
Interestingly, Robin McAlpine noted yesterday that the problem in the SNP was not about rules and procedures but about democracy and culture.