Anyone who’s received a ticking off from the headmistress will know exactly how members of the Scottish National Party’s ruling NEC felt when Nicola Sturgeon cleared her throat and sternly ordered them to stop talking about ‘problems with the party’s finances’.

It was March 20, 2021, and a grubby wee scandal was brewing over the fate of some £667,000, which the SNP had recently raised via online crowd-funding appeals.

The cash was supposed to have been ‘ring-fenced’ to further the cause of separatism, with contributors assuming that it would be placed in the ‘Yes’ campaign’s war-chest for a future referendum.

Strangely, however, the SNP’s accounts had just revealed that the party had a mere £97,000 in the bank. No one seemed able to explain where all the missing cash had gone, or who might have spent it. And senior officials were starting to smell a rat.

Three of them – Frank Ross, Allison Graham and Cynthia Guthrie – were particularly perturbed. They’d just told the NEC meeting that they were resigning from the SNP’s ‘finance and audit committee’ in protest over the whole thing.

What had irked the trio was a weird lack of transparency. Someone in the party was denying them access to crucial documents and records they needed to see if they were to properly understand the Party’s financial position. This obstructiveness felt suspicious; dodgy even.

A PR disaster was, in other words, on the horizon. Some feared that the Press, and even the normally supine Scottish BBC, might start to pay attention. But Sturgeon was having none of it.

After that throat-clearing, and adjusting her thick-rimmed spectacles, the First Minister told her online NEC meeting that contrary to what they might have read ‘the Party has never been in a stronger financial position than it is right now’.

What’s more, she declared, it was a very bad idea for anyone in the SNP to be asking any awkward questions whatsoever about missing funds.

‘Just be very careful about suggestions that there are problems with the party’s finances because we depend on donors to donate,’ she ordered. ‘There are no reasons for people to be concerned about the party’s finances and all of us need to be careful about not suggesting that there is.’

It was a typical brusque display by a woman who presided over a political movement which not only demanded fanatical loyalty from its supporters but also adopted an Orwellian approach to media management.

Throughout Sturgeon’s reign, which dated back to 2014, internal and external critics were about as welcome as dissidents under Stalin. Asking awkward questions about policy, or party management, or anything whatsoever involving her leadership, was regarded as a hostile act.

When it came to party finances, Sturgeon’s words carried particular weight.

Her husband was, after all, Peter Murrell, the organisational genius who’d been the SNP’s chief executive for more than two decades. Their signatures appeared alongside each other at the bottom of its annual accounts. The SNP wasn’t just a political party, it was also very much a family affair.

That, of course, was then.

Fast forward five years and Nicola Sturgeon’s behaviour at that NEC meeting (a video of which leaked two years later) looks very dubious indeed.

At best, you could describe her comments as naïve and hopelessly misguided. At worst, grotesquely cynical. Contrary to what she told the NEC, there were in fact plenty of reasons ‘for people to be concerned about the party’s finances’. For the SNP was in fact falling victim to one of the most brazen frauds in British political history.

We can say this with some authority following Monday’s extraordinary scenes at the High Court in Edinburgh, where Murrell, 61, was remanded in custody after pleading guilty to embezzling an astonishing £400,310.65 from the SNP’s coffers. During a 12-year crime spree, he effectively used the party funds to finance a luxury lifestyle, with prosecutors identifying more than 1,300 suspicious purchases made using cash that faithful supporters had donated.

The astonishing act of betrayal was laid bare in records published by prosecutors, showing the relentless spending which included the purchase of everything from luxury goods to loo rolls, and included £42,000 of Amazon purchases, many of which were delivered to the detached home, in a suburban estate on Glasgow’s eastern suburbs, that he and Nicola had bought for £228,000 shortly before their wedding in 2010.

Murrell spent like a lottery winner, splashing out on an array of items which manage to be both hideously expensive and pathetically vulgar and offer a weird insight into their curated domestic existence.

Party donors were unwittingly buying the couple’s bespoke furniture, designer lighting and state-of-the-art cookware, including a Jura Giga 5 Cromo coffee machine (which cost £3,231.90) and a pair of Lalique salt and pepper grinders priced at an astonishing £2,618.

There were endless shipments of Jo Malone and Estee Lauder make up, plus three Wusthof manicure sets (£294) and six bottles of Avon Skin So Soft body spray (£58.73). In the garden, Murrell installed £150 bird feeders, while the couple’s hallway benefited from no fewer than six high-end umbrellas, weighing in at a total of nearly £2,000.

On the cookware front, a set of Jamie Oliver wooden spoons (£15), a £60 bread bin, and £350-worth of Le Creuset coffee mugs added to a sort of dystopian wedding-list vibe.

Sturgeon has spent the last 48 hours insisting that she was somehow unaware that her husband was perpetrating this brazen fraud, and we must of course take her at her word. But she nonetheless was an unwitting beneficiary of his epic criminality.

Take the smart home library, from which she did interviews during the Covid lockdown ('I share my house with books, rather than the other way round,' she told one interviewer). It was fitted by Neville Johnson Ltd in 2016. The first instalment of the bill, some £1946, came from SNP funds. As did the £943 that was paid for a solid oak 'library ladder'.

A pendant she often wore during TV appearances, from a firm called Shetland Jewellery, was purchased by Murrell in 2019, again using SNP funds.

'They [Peter and Nicola] came in and then Murrell said, while his wife was in the workshop area, ‘I’m the man with the money. I need to buy something’,' the firm’s founder, Kenneth Rae, recalled this week.

So quintessentially Scottish was Murrell in his approach to personal spending that he even appears to have used the party’s cash to buy a £22 copy of a book titled Women Hold Up Half the Sky: Selected Speeches of Nicola Sturgeon. It’s unclear whether he splashed out on an autographed edition.

Nicola was also driven around in a high-end Jaguar iPace, on which her husband spent £57,500 of party cash, but she claims to have been entirely unaware of the notorious Niesmann + Bischoff Smove motorhome, on which he’d splashed another £124,550.

It was stored at his mother’s home in Fife. The fact the couple never got to holiday in it means Murrell’s collection of three “Take the Slow Road” books, a series of motorhome and campervan travel guides, for Scotland, Ireland, and England and Wales (£42.45) was never put to practical use.

To understand how the fraud continued for so long, one must appreciate how unusual – and irregular – Sturgeon’s relationship with her husband actually was.

The couple had first met in the 1990s, when she was a young activist and he was a nerdy party staffer nicknamed 'Penfold' due to his resemblance to the bespectacled sidekick of cartoon character Danger Mouse.

She later recalled remembering him as Mr Gadget Man. ‘He wore a belt with all his gizmos on it, including a very early Psion Organiser,’ Sturgeon said. ‘I was transfixed. How can anybody walk about with that attached to his belt?’

They became a couple in 2003 when Murrell, who had become chief executive two years earlier, helped her fight a re-election battle as an MSP. And when their relationship first became public, at the following Autumn’s party conference, colleagues publicly worried that it therefore blurred the boundaries between professional and personal lives. 'It’s like a cabal at the top of the party,' one complained.

Be that as it may, Murrell was kept on as chief executive as his girlfriend and then wife rose through the party ranks. And upon her election in 2014, he decided to remain in the job.

Critics of that arrangement included the late Alex Salmond, her predecessor as First Minister. But his observation that it created dangerous conflicts of interests and would be unconscionable in the corporate world fell on deaf ears.

Instead, Scotland joined some of the world’s foremost banana republics in having its Government run by a politician who had put their spouse on the party payroll.

Among the problems with that set-up was the fact that it significantly reduced the chances of proper scrutiny of Murrell’s stewardship of the SNP machine, which in turn may explain why the fraud continued for so long.

In fact, the wheels only started to come off the gravy train in 2017, after Sturgeon asked members to donate money to a fund that would be used to campaign for second independence referendum in the wake of the Brexit vote.

The online appeal closed after that year’s general election, which saw the SNP lose 21 of its 56 Westminster seats, having raised around half of the £1million that had been sought. Two years later, Boris Johnson’s victory in the 2019 general election (in which the SNP won back another 27 seats) reignited enthusiasm for independence, so she launched a second fundraising appeal, which raised another £170,000.

What happen to that cash remains shrouded in mystery, but in October 2020 a blogger named Stuart Campbell, who ran a nationalist website 'Wings Over Scotland' noticed that it didn’t appear to be in the party’s newly published accounts. Had the cash 'vanished into the maw of the party machine?' he asked.

Questions continued to be asked behind the scenes, and in May 2021, two months after the NEC meeting, another pair of committee members, MP Joana Cherry and Douglas Chapman, also resigned over the whole thing. Chapman, who was party treasurer, complained that he had 'not received the support or financial information to carry out the fiduciary duties of national treasurer'.

Among those asked to comment on this development was John Swinney, then the party’s deputy leader, a childhood friend of Murrell whom he’d met in the Boys’ Brigade in Edinburgh during the 1970s.

Mr Swinney is, of course, now Scotland’s first minister, overseeing an annual budget of some £68 billion in taxpayer funds. He told the BBC that he did not understand why Chapman had quit and did not think the matter was worthy of any proper inquiry.

The police took a different view, however. In July 2021, they launched an inquiry after receiving seven complaints about SNP donations. One came from pro-independence campaigner Sean Clerkin. 'She was surrounded by sycophants who basically did her bidding,” he recalled yesterday. I lost friends over this. People I had gone to marches and rallies for independence with backs on me. I even got a death threat from one guy.'

As the balloon started to go up, Sturgeon nonetheless continued to allow her husband to cling to his job. It wasn’t until March 2023 that he resigned, after being forced to admit that he’d published false statistics about the party’s membership. Sturgeon had also just quit as First Minister, claiming her time in office had run its course.

Less than a month later, the police came knocking at the couple’s door. At the time, Sturgeon publicly promised she would 'co-operate fully' with police. But it was reported this week that she in fact spent seven hours at Falkirk police station in the company of a lawyer answering “no comment” to every significant question she was asked about the whole thing.

Yesterday, her successor John Swinney was asked what he thought of that response. 'I have got no comment to offer about police investigations,' he declared. Or to put things differently, the First Minister is now not commenting about not commenting. So it goes, in the banana republic of SNP-run Scotland.