Quite Right: Peter Murrell's mafia-style SNP
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.3 • 825 Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2026
⏱️ 51 minutes
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Summary
Peter Murrell's mafia-style SNP & could the Reform-Restore feud hand Burnham Makerfield?
This week: the Peter Murrell scandal and the collapse of the SNP’s moral authority. After Nicola Sturgeon’s estranged husband and the party’s former chief executive pleaded guilty to embezzling more than £400,000 from SNP funds, Michael and Madeline ask what this reveals about the party that dominated Scottish politics for more than a decade. Was this simply one man’s disgrace – or a symptom of a political machine that had grown too powerful, too closed and too complacent?
Also on the podcast: the growing split on the right. As Rupert Lowe’s Restore threatens to divide the Reform vote in the Makerfield by-election, could Andy Burnham be saved by a battle between Nigel Farage and his former allies?
And finally: the rise of the well-worriers. From Zoe and Oura rings to sleep scores, glucose monitors and heart-rate variability, the middle classes are no longer just trying to be healthy – they are trying to measure every flicker of human existence. Is all this self-tracking making us fitter, or just more neurotic?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Subscribe to The Spectator and get 12 weeks of Britain's most incisive politics coverage, unrivaled books and arts reviews, and so much more, all for just £12. |
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| 0:26.0 | Hello and welcome to The Spectators podcast Quite Right, with me, Michael Gove, editor of The Spectator. |
| 0:32.3 | And this week, Madeline Grant and I will be discussing Peter Murrell, Nicola Sturgeon and the S&P great embezzlement scandal, |
| 0:41.2 | the married couple who were at the heart of Scottish politics, and who, it now appears, |
| 0:47.4 | were benefiting from thousands of pounds being diverted to all sorts of ludicrous purchases, Maddie and I will be examining |
| 0:56.0 | what this tells us about politics. We'll also be looking at reform and restore, and their |
| 1:00.7 | battle for the right in the maker field by election. What does that tell us about the ability of all |
| 1:07.2 | the forces of the United Kingdom to gather against the Saron that is stormer. |
| 1:13.0 | And we'll be discussing wellness. How boring is it? |
| 1:19.6 | FIFA, new cars, watches and a salt and pepper shaker set that costs more than two and a half thousand pounds. |
| 1:28.5 | These are just a few of the items which Peter Morrill has bought with embezzled funds from SMP donors. |
| 1:36.2 | He's yet to face sentencing, but he came out an admitted guilt, which I think came as a surprise to many people, |
| 1:42.1 | but it's meant that we now have this unbelievable deluge of crazy items |
| 1:46.2 | that Morrill has been buying. |
| 1:48.5 | Firstly, what are your thoughts on, I guess, that particular state of affairs, |
| 1:53.4 | but also the broader question, which I think is the elephant in the room here, |
| 1:57.0 | which is how is it possible that Nicola Sturgeon could have been completely unaware of |
| 2:01.1 | any of this? |
| 2:02.3 | You're absolutely right. |
| 2:03.5 | Most embezzlement stories involve spectacularly flashy purchases and a sybaritic lifestyle, |
... |
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