Scotland’s Media, Not Just Nicola Sturgeon, Has Questions to Answer Over the Murrell Affair

In the 2016 film the Big Short, which tells the story of the US subprime mortgage crash, two young traders who see the future financial meltdown coming decide to visit an old college friend, now a financial journalist at the Wall Street Journal, and deliver him the scoop on a plate.

To their astonishment, he shows no interest, and is even flippant when they outline the details of the imminent deluge (‘Nice speech, you sound like Oliver Stone’).

“I thought you were for real?” one says, to which he replies: “You try being for real with a three-year-old and a wife who’s doing her masters. I’m not burning through my contacts because of your hunch.”

They leave dumbfounded, and conclude: “He won’t do his job because he wants to keep access to the banks, so he can keep the job he won’t do.”

It’s a good line and one that resonates strongly in the wake of the sordid saga of Peter Murrell, former CEO of the SNP and erstwhile husband of former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. Murrell has admitted embezzling £400,000 of party funds to purchase luxury vehicles and sundry knick-knacks and bibelots.

Just substitute ‘banks’ for Scottish Government ministers, and ‘he’ for the mainstream Scottish media.

Because lost among the screaming headlines and imaginative parodies – most of which are focused on Nicola Sturgeon – is a vital question; and it’s not, “What did Nicola know?” (though that is undoubtedly important), but: “Why did the Scottish media choose not to know?”

For the fact that this scandal ever saw the light of day is almost entirely down to the work of the ‘Rev’ Stuart Campbell of the pro-independence blog Wings over Scotland. Campbell broke the story in 2020, and though that fact is now reasonably well known, what isn’t is that early on, Campbell reached out to many of Scotland’s most prominent journalists, asking why they were not pursuing it.

He received not a single reply.

When the police were forced to take the matter seriously after complaints were made, Scotland’s established media finally got on board – but even then, only in a minimal, grudging way. As Brian Monteith of the Think Scotland blog puts it, even “when it was clear through resignations and public complaints that funds were unaccounted for… the matter received little interest from the mainstream media”. Veteran broadcaster Bernard Ponsonby said the established media had been “asleep at the wheel” on his political podcast with Alex Massie.

Campbell continued to be subjected to abuse and patronising sneers from ‘real’ journalists (when his role was acknowledged at all). Nonetheless, he persisted, with angry but viscerally powerful, well-researched pieces that kept the story alive and the pressure on.

Scotland owes him a debt.

His blog remains essential reading for anyone who truly wishes to understand Scottish politics. But therein lies the rub: when it came to what Murrell – and possibly Nicola Sturgeon – were up to, did the Scottish mainstream media actually want to understand?

The answer would appear to be: seemingly not that much. As to why, I can think of several reasons.

The first is age-old, neatly encapsulated by Upton Sinclair’s maxim that “it’s hard to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it”.

The SNP government was all-powerful and not to be crossed lightly. Take it on, and you were likely to find yourself frozen out or set upon by the ravenous hordes of Cyber Nats. The ship of state was a leaky vessel with a motley, cutthroat crew. It didn’t do to rock it.

Witness the case of Stephen Daisley, who took on the SNP when he worked for STV – the SNP allegedly lobbied the channel to gag him. Witness the treatment of Sarah Smith, BBC Scotland political editor, who said she was subjected to vile online trolling for what most considered even-handed reporting of Scottish affairs; or the vicious attacks on a then cancer-stricken Nick Robinson for the same crime during the 2013 referendum – the bullying seemed to work, and more recent BBC coverage has been toothless.

Then there is the cult of Saint Nicola, which the mainstream media bought into as much as anyone. This phenomenon was a feature, I suspect, of an immature and insecure devolved body politic that desperately craved its own globally renowned, validating figure – a role Sturgeon saw herself fit for, even if in the end nobody else did.

It suited Scottish journalists, and much of the rest of Scottish society, to elevate Sturgeon to the stature of a Caledonian Bismarck bestriding the political scene like a compact colossus, running rings around the pygmies at Westminster. It was comforting, it was flattering. And it made for good copy.

Questioning the myth was unlikely to make you popular, especially in the woke media, as Sturgeon rose to prominence at the height of the culture wars – which she stoked – when a woman in a position of power was virtually beyond criticism.

There is also professional pride and the sunk cost of having invested in, believed in and promoted a woman who turns out on closer inspection to have feet of clay and the morals of the back alley. How to climb down from that position and admit to the day-one sceptics that you were wrong and they were right?

There is too, in the treatment of Wings a seeming contempt for (mingled perhaps with fear of) alternative media, blogs, podcasters and citizen journalists. Even to acknowledge the existence of the talented outsider is to invite uncomfortable questions about utility, competence and independence.

But those uncomfortable questions must be addressed, and rather urgently, if a sharp decline in people’s trust in Scottish politics wrought by the Murrell affair is not to be paralleled with an evaporation of faith in Scotland’s mainstream media.

Philip Patrick is a freelance journalist.

Stop Press: In the Times, Alex Massie says Jon Swinney needs to conduct a thorough investigation into how this happened, but won’t of course.