Do you like a laugh? Do you find glee in listening to someone trying to dupe you? Have you ever had someone tried to take the rip roaring piss out of with a straight face and know that is what they are up too? If the answer to all these questions is yes, then you might find yourself in for a real treat. It seems more than highly likely that in the not too distance future the probe into SNP finances is doing to yield criminal charges. You may ask why, because it allegedly appears according to the SNP own financial accounts, that the money raised for #indyref2 isn’t in the SNP accounts. And for the purposes of ass covering the three people, Nicola Sturgeon, Peter Murrell and Colin Beattie who were arrested by Police Scotland are ‘innocent until proven guilty’. Yes, these three have the right to be considered innocent, whether as they can publicly claim they are innocent, no one can say they’re guilty because that may prejudice their right to a fair trial.
So far, two people out of three have gone on record as saying they are innocent of any wrongdoing, Nicola Sturgeon and Colin Beattie. Operation Branchform was launched in 2021 after several complaints were made to Police Scotland regarding the SNP's finances. At this point, it would remiss to not mention the ‘man of the hour’, Sean Clerkin. Although seen as a maverick and a fringe outsider, this guy has blown the SNP to bits more effectively than a 105 mm howitzer. Scotland raised an eyebrow when Police Scotland storm into the SNP and the private home of Peter Murrell and Nicola Sturgeon. We watched with interest as Police Scotland went 'the full bhoona' during their search of Sturgeon’s house with a tent erected on the front lawn and the press pack hovering about outside. We rejoiced as Police took away boxes of evidence, Poice probing SNP finances looking into designer pens, burner phones, pots and pans, and a fridge freezer among other things in a search that last 30 hours. Even teabags weren’t safe from being ‘tagged and bagged’. It was revealed Police were examining an Amazon shopping account, and 1000 allegations of fraud in relation to this fraud probe, the ‘amazon card of destiny’, lighter than the stone of destiny but with more value.
In the aftermath of the Police raid, we saw Former SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon passionately declare her innocence. Sycophants emerged from the shadows and made interventions that ‘oor Nicola’ isn’t bent, including one from her buddy SNP MP Anne McLaughlin. Flowers were organized to be sent to her, which many people found rather odd. It seems that more work was being done on ‘Nicola is innocent’ than on indyref2. One interesting point was said by Nicola Sturgeon in terms of her defence, and that she was, she was speaking for herself and herself alone. No rubber stamp of innocence was available it seems for husband, Peter Murrell; he had to do his own declarations, but is notably silent. When I heard about this, I immediately thought of the Tammy Wynette song, ‘Stand by your man’. Whether Nicola Sturgeon is standing by her man is a question which might be relevant at some future date, in the event of any possible unpleasantness.
For those who have watched Nicola Sturgeon and her political career over the years closely, you would have homed in on theme she used time and time again in relation to SNP scandals, her constant use of don’t know to any scandal.
Now, in the event of any future trial into SNP finances, and if Nicola Sturgeon is charged, it seems renewed speculation has surfaced that Nicola Sturgeon may claim she was too busy running the country to know that bizarre purchases at the centre of a criminal investigation were made with SNP funds. The claim is apparently been made by party insiders who think this is the most viable route in the event of her facing a possible criminal trial. Senior nationalist sources expect Sturgeon arrested in June, to insist she did not know that a string of assets, including a luxury motorhome seized from her mother-in-law’s driveway, were paid for by the party she led. It should be point out that Sturgeon was responsible for the SNP finances. In a trial any old tosh can be used as a defence, ‘it wisnae me’ being the most popular, ‘it was that bastard over there’ being also accepted or a combination of both. It is for a jury having been fed a story during a trial to analyse fact from fiction. It is at the end of the day for a jury to take all information/ evidence presented and mull over claims and counter claims made. However associates of Ms Sturgeon; have admitted that her claims may test the credulity of the public. The tricky problem for her lawyers is the many of the items detectives are examining were apparently seized from her own home such as a women's razor.
Does your husband use a women’s razor Ms Sturgeon? If so what for? Then there is the issue of designer pen and jewellery, and many more interesting questions which may come up.
Murray Foote, the SNP’s former media chief and now SNP CEO, told the Daily Record:
“Some of these items are more likely to be on a shopping list than on Interpol’s most wanted. The hunt for a lady’s razor does make you wonder if the police are investigating a bad case of botched beauty treatment”.
Given the humour displayed by Foote, that crack would die a death in a court, because the joke isn’t about the alleged proceeds of crime where spent, only that the money was taken. And the prospect a guilty verdict could see some people have years stuffed up their arse by a court. Have we all forgotten Natalie ‘I am innocent’ McGarry so soon? Her defence was so laughable, that a jury rather speedily concluded that her defence of being no good with numbers just wasn’t credible. It is said Senior SNP figures believed Sturgeon’s denials, claiming that “sometimes the explanation that is hard to believe is actually the one that is true”. And sometimes the opposite of denial based on emotion is more applicable, such as the duck test, this is a form of abductive reasoning, usually expressed as "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck." So, what is the Senior SNP figures belief based on, fuck knows, however, it should be pointed out that in an interview years ago, Sturgeon did allegedly say that she and her husband would discuss things in the morning together before they started their day.
In the SNP finances case, the elephant in the room is not exactly an elephant, it is a campervan. This is a luxury campervan which was parked up on the driveway of Ms Sturgeon’s mother-in-law’s home in Dunfermline. Over the years we have heard how important family is to Nicola Sturgeon, but in the case of Sturgeon’s mother in law who apparently lives alone and is in her 90’s, Sturgeon’s recent claim that she rarely visited her mother-in-law is touted by her believers as “significant”. You may ask significant of what exactly;"see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil"? Others apparently less generous see her comments as an attempt at “floating a possible explanation”. Begs the obvious question, would the police logs from her police protection log her as visiting the mother in law at the same time the campervan was there? I don’t know about you but if a £110k campervan was sitting in a 90 year old woman’s driveway, would you ask about it on a visit? Of course, detectives of Operation Branchform will be able to access her travel logs as part of their investigation.
Original complaint, the one that is your moneymaker right there is of course, the investigation by the police that £600,000 of donations solicited for independence campaigns that never happened had gone “missing” from party accounts. The questions of who took it, who spent and what was it spent on are rather relevant because according to the SNP own recent accounts, it appears to be gone. Words like ‘woven through the accounts’ were previously used, but if you can weave thin air of something which is gone, let me know, oh, and as far as I can tell, no one left a IOU note to pay it back in. Iain Livingstone, the former chief constable, has suggested that detectives had “moved beyond” initial complaints and were now looking at fraud, potential embezzlement and misuse of funds. When I read this, it reminded me immediately of ex SNP MP Natalie McGarry, she was an SNP official and women for indy official who pocketed tens of thousands of donations and spent them on luxury items for herself including a holiday.
“Sometimes the explanation that is hard to believe is actually the one that is true,” a senior SNP source said, and sometimes shit talk is just shit talk.
As part of her ‘innocence tour’ at the Edinburgh Fringe, when quizzed by soft interviewer
Iain Dale about whether she was confident her husband was innocent, Ms Sturgeon insisted nothing should be read into her refusal to say.
She said:
“I am not going to speak for anybody other than myself. In not answering that question, that’s not to say yes or no. I’m not going to try and speak for anyone else, whether it’s my husband or anybody else.”
Sturgeon also refused to say when she became aware of the campervan outside her mother-in-law’s house, an upmarket Niesmann + Bischoff model, which neighbours said never left the driveway. Does that mean she visited the house when the van was there, and it could be confirmed by police logs? If there are no police logs, then her mobile phones data cell tower logs could be used as evidence. Remember when police used this data to convince the killers of Kriss Donald? Your phone pings cell towers all day long.
A source has said.
“Nicola’s only conceivable defence is to say that she knew nothing about it. There had to be a reason for her agreeing to do a very public interview with Iain Dale at such a sensitive time. Her response to the question about the campervan that she never visited her mother in law was very strange. Nicola is not famous for her small talk, but even she couldn’t credibly claim that she didn’t notice a huge brand new campervan on her elderly mother-in-law’s drive or think to ask anything about it. So to say she was never there struck me as her floating a possible explanation.”
Everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty in the eyes of the Court. It is worth mentioning that it is also possible that someone else will be charged, like in football, anything can happen in 90 minutes. A new player being charged at this late date seems very doubtful. Is it possible that no one will be getting charged by the police acting under orders from the Crown; this seems highly unlikely in this situation as well! And as the Crown Office cannot accept the ‘I’m innocent’ defence like in Life of Brian, the key question is, who if anyone gets a police revisit to take them down to the station for charging?
Finally, when Alex Salmond got charged, I was shocked, unlike most of the public, I had met him on several occasions, when his case came to court, I couldn’t wrap my head around the notion he was guilty. Then later on, I found out who was accusing him, not employees spread over a vast Scottish government network, but people close to Nicola Sturgeon. I was sure that if Alex Salmond went to court, he would be found not guilty. Salmond was a threat to the Sturgeon regime, and many believe he was stitched up in an attempted to get him in prison and out of the way. Personally, in the event of any future trial involving anyone charged in the SNP finances scandal, I don’t have the same confidence or belief as I had in Alex Salmond in their ability to walk into court innocent, and more importantly, walk out innocent.
Who knows who will be charged, but I remember Natalie McGarry’s bullshit defence, and think to myself, some people better get their act together, and their act needs to be truthful, because juries are fickle, they don’t like being played or conned. As Tommy Sheridan and Natalie McGarry found to their cost, being a good talker doesn’t work in a criminal trial, something others should bear in mind.
