Humza Yousaf's big day ruined

The arrest of the SNP national treasurer, Colin Beattie, upstages the First Minister's vision speech

“Events, dear boy, events”, said Harold Macmillan, when asked what is the most difficult thing about being in government. Events in Scotland are happening so rapidly that it is becoming almost impossible to keep up. This was supposed to be Humza Yousaf's big day, his opportunity to draw a line under the recent scandal about the SNP's finances and start talking about how he intends to govern Scotland. Fat chance. He was upstaged by the latest arrest in the seemingly eternal police investigation, Operation Branchform, into the use of that £600,000 in donations to the SNP that were supposed to be “ring fenced” for a referendum campaign that never happened.

This time it is Colin Beattie, the SNP party treasurer, who has been taken into police custody. Two weeks ago, it was the party chief executive, Peter Murrell, who had his collar felt. He was released without charge in what Police Scotland call an “ongoing investigation” into party finances. Colin Beattie, MSP for Midlothian North and Musselburgh, had been party treasurer for 18 years until he was replaced by Douglas Chapman MP in 2020. Chapman resigned a year later claiming he had been being denied “the financial information to carry out the fiduciary duties of the National Treasurer” and Beattie was restored to the post.

On Saturday Beattie reportedly told the SNP's National Executive Committee that he was “having difficulty in balancing the books due to the reduction in membership and donors”. He was contradicted the very next morning by the former Westminster leader, Ian Blackford, who insisted that the party's finances are “in robust health” and that the SNP can meet all its financial obligations. It emerged last week that the SNP auditors, Johnston Carmichael, had resigned and that no replacement auditor had been found to validate the party accounts before the July deadline.

That's about all we can really say about the latest twist to the campervangate tale. Under contempt rules, any one who comments on Mr Beattie's arrest, or on the police investigation, risks two years imprisonment or an unlimited fine. We are not supposed to comment on criminal investigations in case they prejudice the jury the outcome of a trial.

But as I argued in my Spectator column today, the succession of arrests has already arguably prejudiced the public against the Scottish National Party and its former leader, Nicola Sturgeon. As Professor John Curtice, our leading polling expert, pointed out last week after the police erected that forensics tent and surrounded Nicola Sturgeon's Uddingston home with police cars, “these images cannot be erased from the public mind”. 

How Humza Yousaf must wish he had never let it be said that he is the “continuity candidate”. Tomorrow's front pages will all be about police arresting another SNP official over the “missing” £600,000, not his vision of a “progressive Scotland” and a “wellbeing economy”. Yousaf already had to contend this week with demands that Nicola Sturgeon be suspended, and/or forced to resign her seat. He said yesterday that the former SNP leader should not be suspended adding: “We are far past the time of judging what a woman does based on what happens to her husband”. 

This is true, but the SNP has been only too willing in the past to suspend politicians and officials when there is the slightest hint of wrong doing or questions about their character.  Critics will cite the suspension of the former children's minister, Mark McDonald, in 2017 when he was accused of sending saucy texts, and the MSP Michelle Thomson in 2015 when police investigated her property deals. No action was taken but Thomson has only recently been able to restart her career and McDonald never did. The SNP is certainly guilty perhaps of double standards in not giving the same treatment to Sturgeon – but at the same time, two wrongs do not make a right as I also said in my Spectator column on the latest blow to the SNP’s battered public image.

Like everyone else involved in this most bizarre criminal investigation Nicola Sturgeon has a right to natural justice. But matters are out of her and Humza Yousaf's control. It has been open season in the SNP National Executive where members have been claiming all manner of mischief and maladministration by the previous regime and claiming that the party is “rotten to the core”.

A video emerged at the weekend in the Sunday Mail of Nicola Sturgeon in March 2021 dismissing claims that there were funding difficulties or irregularities in party funding. Soon after, the party treasurer, Douglas Chapman, resigned. Now the new party treasurer, Colin Beattie, is helping police with their inquiries into the management of party funds. There is, to repeat, no evidence of any wrong-doing, and no one has been charged in Operation Branchform. But it it seems hard to believe that the Scottish National Party can recover from this astonishing sequence of events, dear boy, events.