This was not the start Humza Yousaf wanted. Just a week after taking office as Scotland’s first minister, Yousaf was on Wednesday responding to the arrest of the husband of his predecessor Nicola Sturgeon by police investigating the finances of his governing Scottish National party.
For Scotland, the arrest of Peter Murrell, chief executive of the SNP since 1999 and Sturgeon’s husband since 2010, is an extraordinary moment. For Yousaf and the SNP it is the latest in a series of setbacks analysts said could threaten the pro-independence party’s dominance of the nation’s politics.
“This is a difficult day for the party,” Yousaf told broadcasters as police searched the SNP headquarters in Edinburgh and the Sturgeon-Murrell residence in Glasgow as part of what the national force said was an “ongoing investigation” into SNP “funding and finances”.
“The visuals of this are absolutely astonishing,” said Mark Diffley, an expert on Scottish public opinion, of the scenes of police officers going into the SNP headquarters and of the blue incident tent they erected on the front lawn of Scotland’s premier power couple.
Diffley said news of the arrest would undermine Yousaf’s efforts to create a positive image for himself with the many voters yet to take a view of the new first minister following his narrow victory last week in a bitterly contested SNP leadership election.
“It’s really bad for Humza,” said Diffley, adding that Yousaf’s image as a “continuity candidate” from the Sturgeon era made the arrest even more difficult for him. “He can’t get on to the front foot, he’s not setting the agenda here — he’s reacting to events that are blowing up around him.”
Police Scotland has declined to give any detail of the investigation it launched in 2021 after receiving seven complaints related to donations to the SNP.
Donors claimed hundreds of thousands of pounds given during a 2017 referendum appeal and a subsequent 2019 fundraising effort had been spent by the party on other things.
Driving the complaints, which were first reported by the pro-independence but anti-Sturgeon website Wings Over Scotland, was discontent among some independence supporters.
Many were angry at what they saw as Sturgeon’s failure to deliver another referendum after Scots in 2014 backed remaining in the UK by 55 per cent to 45 per cent.
In June 2017, Sturgeon put plans for a second referendum on hold after the SNP lost 21 seats in a UK general election. Her later attempts to force another vote were stymied by the UK government’s refusal to authorise such a move.
The SNP has said all its activities are directly or indirectly directed at bringing an end to Scotland’s three century-old union with England. But critics have long complained about what they said was a lack of transparency in the party.
Some SNP colleagues said the party was too tightly controlled by Sturgeon and Murrell, who was an influential chief executive with an impressive record of organising the election victories that brought the SNP to power in 2007 and cemented its position thereafter.
Fuelling such complaints, the SNP declined to explain a £107,620 loan Murrell made to the party in 2021 “for working capital purposes”. The loan was not declared by the SNP to the Electoral Commission until more than a year later, in a breach of election finance rules.
The SNP on Wednesday said it would be inappropriate to comment on any live police investigation, but that it had been co-operating fully with the national force and would continue to do so.
Murrell could not be reached for comment.
Yousaf, who before his election as leader was not an SNP office bearer, said he had met lawyers to understand the party’s finances. He added that on Saturday he had gained agreement from the SNP’s national executive committee for a “course of action” on governance and transparency that would include “external input”.
“I think that external input is going to be really important, because people do have questions about the party, about transparency, about our finances,” Yousaf said. “I think we have to reassure our own party membership as well as the broader Scottish public.”
Murrell’s arrest could add to internal strains on the SNP that were laid bare in the leadership contest. Some SNP members question when party leaders might have known such action was likely.
The Wings Over Scotland website on Tuesday published a freedom of information response from Police Scotland that said the force’s chief and deputy chief constables visited the Scottish parliament in early February for a regular meeting with the then justice secretary and SNP deputy leader Keith Brown.
One senior SNP member critical of the party hierarchy said if Murrell had been arrested earlier it could have helped Yousaf’s rivals in the party leadership contest: the then finance secretary Kate Forbes and former community safety minister Ash Regan, both of whom ran campaigns critical of Sturgeon’s record. “If this had happened before the leadership election I think Kate would have won,” added the SNP member.
Scottish opposition parties are hoping to benefit from SNP troubles. The party’s opinion poll lead over Labour for a UK general election has fallen to single digits in recent months, even though backing for independence remains relatively stable at just below half of voters.
Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde university, said the SNP’s great strength in recent years had been its near monopoly of the support of people who would vote “Yes” to independence in a referendum — but recent polls showed at least some such voters were now shifting to Labour.
“The SNP are beginning to struggle to maintain the loyalty of ‘Yes’ voters,” he said.
Diffley said the shift created a potential “nightmare scenario” for the SNP. “It could happen quite quickly that they go from this absolutely imperious dominance to risking not even being the biggest party,” he added. “We are still a way off that, but that is the direction of travel.”