WATCHING A STACK of dominos collapsing on YouTube seemed a metaphor for what has been happening in Scotland recently.

On 23 February 2023, Sir Iain Livingstone announced he would resign from the post of Chief Constable of Police Scotland, two years before his current contract expires. This was in the wake of John Swinney’s budget which would, said Livingstone, create ‘hard choices’ for the police. Another factor may have been the complete unworkability of the Hate Crime Act with which Humza Yousaf had lumbered Police Scotland when he was Justice Minister. This came a year after the abrupt resignation of the second chief of the Scottish National Investment Bank in eighteen months (and still not replaced).

But the big one was the announcement on 15 February 2023 of the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon as Scottish First Minister. This was followed by the intimation by John Swinney that he would resign as Deputy First Minister. What has followed would have stumped Lady Bracknell: ‘to lose one parent…’.

The numbers of the SNP’s loss of officers are greater than her dictum encompasses, but the sentiment is appropriate. Yet perhaps ‘chaos’ is more fitting than ‘carelessness’ in the SNP’s case. After Sturgeon’s resignation and a short interval, the resignations came thick and fast: Liz Lloyd as Sturgeon’s special adviser, Murray Foote as the SNP’s Parliamentary Group’s communications head, and, the other big one, on 18 March and with immediate effect, Peter Murrell, the SNP’s long-serving chief executive and arguably the architect of its electoral successes.

The case of Murrell is intriguing, not least since we know so little about him that we might term him the eminence grise of the SNP. Beyond his birth date (08.12.64), and that he was educated in Edinburgh and Glasgow, that he worked in Alex Salmond’s Banff and Buchan constituency office, became SNP chief executive in 1999 and married Nicola Sturgeon in 2010, both his career details and private life are carefully guarded secrets. It has been alleged the reason for this lies in various injunctions invoked to safeguard his privacy. Perhaps one day an enterprising biographer will be able to give us the full account that is currently lacking.

There can be no doubt that Murrell has been the mastermind behind the organisation of the modern SNP as a tightly-disciplined and unquestioningly loyal band of separatist supporters, whose faith in both the secessionist project and the infallibility of the party leadership which would lead them to the promised land of a new Scottish state, was for long unflinching. It may be too much to say that Murrell has been Sturgeon’s Svengali, but the clear impression is that he has been the one who has fashioned SNP policy and tactics. He has certainly been one of the very few members of Sturgeon’s inner circle. He has also built up a core group of cadres who have dominated large-scale party propaganda activities. It is probably not too much to say that nothing has happened in the SNP without Murrell’s knowledge and acquiescence. That is why, in the end, he had to take responsibility for the lies that were told in public about the SNP’s membership figures.

Want to see more SNP fails? – Environmental Matters