Skeletons won’t stop coming out of SNP cupboard

IT was somehow appropriate that Alex Salmond should make one of his rare appearances in the Scottish parliament last Wednesday – just as the party was facing its biggest crisis since the referendum. As the former First Minister swaggered about, slapping the backs of colleagues and throwing barbed insults at those he doesn’t like, the real SNP leadership team was in a crisis meeting.

As Nicola Sturgeon was closeted with senior aides, working out what to do, one Nationalist MSP remarked on how fortunate the party was that Mr Salmond was not in charge any more. ‘If he had still been the leader, he would just have tried to brazen this out. Nicola knows this is a problem that has to be fixed.’

The crisis facing the SNP is ostensibly about Edinburgh West MP Michelle Thomson; but it is really much wider and deeper.

Mrs Thomson is in trouble because she was involved in buying properties cheap from ‘vulnerable people’, according to Labour, then selling them on immediately for a hefty profit.

Now that is all fairly murky stuff and no one has any idea where it is going to go.

What is clear, though, is that Miss Sturgeon has taken a dim view of it. She has principles, one of which is that the SNP should stand up for the poor and downtrodden and not exploit their problems to make a quick buck.

This is why the First Minister has made it clear publicly that, if Mrs Thomson was doing such things, her career in the SNP will have as much future as a Union Flag at a pro-independence rally.

But Miss Sturgeon is also very aware that Mrs Thomson’s problems could be the tip of a very large iceberg for the SNP – and this is what really worries her.

Indeed, there is fear – real fear – at the top of the party that there could be scandal after scandal to come, as the unsavoury activities of one MP after another are exposed to the public.

‘There will be more Michelle Thomsons,’ one Nationalist MSP warned this week, talking of a ‘hurried, shambolic and perfunctory’ vetting process for those wishing to stand. It was supposed to uncover all the potential skeletons in all the cupboards of all those wanting to become MPs – but it was so haphazard it barely touched the surface.

It is worth remembering what was going on this time last year. The SNP was in chaos. Every member of staff was answering the phones and signing up all those new members – the 100,000 who joined after the referendum.

The party infrastructure could not cope. It just about kept track of all the new members, managing to squeeze them for subs and getting their details. But at the same time, it had to select its candidates for the Westminster election – and this is where the process collapsed.

Instead of detailed interviews, not just with the candidate but with close friends and members of their family and business associates, they only had to fill out a form declaring anything which might later embarrass the party.

There was neither the time nor the resources to check anything properly. As a result, a whole host of unknowns was selected, some of them new to the party.

SNP managers felt they had an escape clause because they never expected them all to be elected – but then they pretty much were.

The upshot is that the SNP has 55 MPs (there used to be 56, but Mrs Thomson is no longer among them) and party managers know next to nothing about the pasts of many of these new tribunes.

MRS Thomson was the first to suffer; but are there others with murky pasts, whether in business or on social media or in their private lives? Almost certainly. This is what must be keeping Peter Murrell, the SNP chief executive and Miss Sturgeon’s husband, awake at night.

In the past, when the SNP was relatively small, everybody knew everyone else. It was relatively easy to make sure those with ‘issues’ were kept away from frontline politics. But now, with 100,000 new members, a legion of new MPs and a vetting process that cannot cope with the demands placed upon it, the SNP is i n trouble. And the real worry for Mr Murrell and Miss Sturgeon is that they have no idea what might come next.

They know that, having tasted blood, the media and the opposition will rampage on, looking for all those ‘issues’ which the sloppy SNP vetting process should have thrown up, but didn’t.

There was wry amusement among the SNP’s opponents last week that the party will now have trouble shifting merchandise branded ‘56’ to celebrate the election triumph – given its cohort of MPs has now dropped to 55.

But Miss Sturgeon is well aware that shifting some T-shirts will be the least of her worries if, as many suspect, there are more skeletons to emerge from the cupboard in the coming months. If that happens, public confidence in ‘Scotland’s party’ will sink – and there will be nothing she will be able to do about it.