Curiosity isn't enough to justify an inquiry

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There is no rule or mechanism which guarantees that members of a political party committed to the pursuit of a cause rather than merely power will be any more honest or less venal than mere careerists; nor that they will be any more resistant to temptation when it is waved in front of their noses. But, somehow, we all want to believe that ‘our’ side are more inherently honest and genuine than everybody else. As a result, the conviction, last week, of the former CEO of the SNP (and ex-husband of the former First Minister) somehow comes as more of a shock, to say nothing of disappointment, than the secret £5 million payment to Farage, or a whole host of financial scandals relating to other politicians in recent years.

Having been Treasurer of a party for five years in the 1980s, I’ll admit that I’m somewhat mystified as to how it can have happened. The level of scrutiny to which accounts were submitted back then was intense, and I distinctly remember lengthy meetings examining the budgets line by line looking for potential savings for a party which was perpetually cash-strapped. Things are different now: the advent of devolution has transformed the finances of parties which are now at the centre of events rather than eternally on the periphery. But still… The defence that the auditors had signed off the accounts looks rather weak to me. A thorough audit would surely have checked that expenditure (for large items as a minimum) was properly authorised and had an appropriate ‘paper’ trail in terms of invoices and receipts, but it’s hard to believe that to have been the case in relation to some of the items on the list. I find myself with a number of serious unanswered questions.

It’s true, as some of the SNP’s opponents have suggested, that the guilty plea means that those questions will never be aired in open court. That’s a pity – as much for the members of the party, who are the victims here, as for the wider public – but the idea that that justifies some sort of public inquiry is a strange one. I can see the attraction to the SNP’s opponents of demanding such an inquiry; keeping the scandal running for as long as possible has its political attractions for parties which have been unable to make a serious dent in the SNP’s popularity. But public inquiries are not cheap, and if one were to be set up for every resolved crime that left the curious with some unanswered questions, there would be an awful lot more public inquiries being held. Good news for the lawyers, I suppose, but probably not for the rest of us.

Whether the initial investigation was politically-motivated or not isn’t entirely clear – but the way it was handled, with a ‘murder tent’ outside the house and so forth, certainly looked a lot like a political act. Even the stated cause for the investigation, that money had been raised for one purpose and then spent on another, looked more than a little dodgy; the idea that specific pounds and pennies would somehow be locked away in a special account doesn’t look like a realistic expectation. It seems, though, that they found a real crime, even if it wasn’t quite the one they were looking for. It’s a disappointment, of course – but to return to my starting point, there is no rule which guarantees honesty, even amongst those apparently committed to a cause. Clay feet can appear even where they’re least expected.