At the end of June, I was in The Old Fruit Market in Glasgow with Martin Frizell for the inaugural Scottish podcast awards. We’d been nominated for This Much is True Crime in the ‘True Crime, Mystery & The Dark Stuff’ category. Along with Kaye Adams, the co-host for the evening was the Clydebank comedian Marc Jennings, who good-heartedly joked about how we should therefore all watch out for flying pencils.
However, it was another of his quips that really caught my attention. Jennings joshed that James English – the Scot with the incredibly successful podcast Anything Goes – had intended to be at the awards but had had to cancel as he was now interviewing Peter Murrell. Anything Goes does indeed offer a platform to various hoodlums, gangsters, waifs and strays with little or no pushback from English about what they claim, or how they justify their offending behaviour. Frankly, it’s why they choose to go on his podcast.
Like all good jokes, Jennings captured a widespread sense that people really would like to hear from Murrell and try to understand what had motivated him to defraud SNP party funds for the best part of 12 years – a crime for which he had just been sentenced to five years and three months in prison. We didn’t learn much about his motivation from the judge’s sentencing remarks and, other than expressing remorse for what he had done, Murrell hasn’t offered any explanation himself. So, in those absences, we are left with what Police Scotland suggested about the frauds - which they claimed had allowed Murrell to maintain a “lavish lifestyle”. Frankly, that’s ludicrous.
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I have myself been asked about all of this by a number of journalists, and Martin and I even speculated about Murrell’s motivation in an episode of This Much is True Crime. I’ve pointed out, for example, that fraud is usually understood from an instrumental perspective. In other words, the fraud is committed to allow the perpetrator to pay bills, stave off bankruptcy, buy goods that they can’t actually afford, or to cover debts that have been accrued through gambling, poor financial decisions or addictions.
What’s rarely considered is that fraud can just as easily be committed for expressive or psychological reasons as much as being motivated by factors which are instrumental. In other words, the fraud is committed not because the fraudster needs the money, but because he’s expressing a need that is being unmet in other aspects of his life. He wants recognition and to be seen; he wants to be validated for the work that he does. He wants praise and to be noticed; to be front and centre, rather than backstage.
There are a number of reasons to suspect that it was these expressive reasons which motivated Murrell’s behaviour, rather than the lifestyle that the frauds might have facilitated. After all, with the money that he embezzled he bought goods that were irrelevant to his and Nicola Sturgeon’s lives. No one needs expensive umbrellas, a Le Creuset granite square grill, two Montblanc fountain pens or a Caran d'Ache pencil sharpener. Even the £125,000 Niesmann+Bischoff Smove motorhome – parked on his mother’s driveway in Dunfermline – had only been driven for four miles. It was not the goods themselves that drove his crimes, but the fact that by engaging in the fraud he was able to give credit to his work without which, as he would have seen it, the SNP would not have been successful.
The fact that the frauds continued for over a decade also allows us to view how Murrell’s expressive motivation developed. Initially the frauds were banal and mundane, but gradually they grew in size. I get the sense that this was not so much about testing the accounting systems within the SNP but much more to do with his feelings about his work and how this was tied to his sense of self and a growing dissatisfaction with how his contribution to the party’s success was ignored and disregarded.
Of course, I have made this all about the general rather than the specific and personal. I could just as easily have made the same points about his relationship with Nicola Sturgeon, as I have about his need for recognition within the SNP. It seems plausible to me that the frauds grew as his relationship deteriorated and that Murrell’s crimes might well mirror what we know - and suspect - was happening behind closed doors. In fact, I’ve speculated that he always knew the long arm of the law was going to tap him on the shoulder but that didn’t discourage Murrell from what he was doing as he actually wanted to be caught. Being convicted was a subtle form of revenge and seems to have shifted responsibility from him to his former partner.
Here we enter the territory of “she must have known!” - despite the fact that Nicola Sturgeon has consistently denied that she did. Murrell might indeed have been buying luxury goods with money that he’d embezzled but she has consistently stated that she didn’t know that was the case. She saw the motorhome but didn’t realise the means by which Murrell had come to acquire it. Criminology would support Sturgeon. In my career I’ve come across innumerable cases where an intimate partner simply didn’t know what their “better half” was up to, and not just involving fraud. I’ve met wives who really had no idea that their husbands were predatory paedophiles, rapists, murderers or even serial killers – as in the case of Paula Dietz, the wife of the serial killer Dennis Rader, and despite the fact that all 10 of his murders were committed during their 34 years of marriage.
This Much is True Crime didn’t win and the award on the night went to Dundee University’s Inside Forensic Science podcast in our category. However, when Murrell is ready to talk – and I think that one day he will want to explain his behaviour – I hope that he chooses to speak to us, rather than Anything Goes.
David Wilson is emeritus professor of criminology at Birmingham City University and a former prison governor
