“It was just like a torrent,” Allison Graham said of the reaction she met on the committee. “I’m not a shy, retiring individual but this was like being bullied in the playground. It felt as if you were being kicked.”
Graham and fellow SNP whistleblower Cynthia Guthrie say senior figures in the party, Nicola Sturgeon among them, bullied them when they tried to question the SNP’s accounts. On Thursday, First Minister John Swinney again declined to apologise to them directly. He also rejected the idea that Sturgeon or anyone else at the top had bullied anyone.
Two women, one committee
Guthrie, an HR executive, and Graham, a business analyst, both held unpaid roles on the SNP’s finance and audit committee in 2021. They resigned alongside former Edinburgh Lord Provost Frank Ross, complaining of “obvious procrastination” from Peter Murrell, then chief executive. They said they had been given contradictory information and had “no way” of providing “scrutiny and governance”.
In an interview with the Scottish Sun, the two criticised Swinney and Sturgeon for “enabling” Murrell’s £400,000 fraud and for repeatedly saying in public that no money had gone missing. Murrell was jailed only days earlier, for five years and three months, for embezzling more than £400,000 from the party.
Graham said Sturgeon praised a Highland councillor who launched a “verbal attack”, and that others criticised them too. Sturgeon, she said, “came in very clearly to shut it down” and “was using her positional authority to demean what I said”. Graham’s account of the exchange: “It was like, ‘I’m the First Minister, I know better’. Nobody backed me up.” Asked if Sturgeon bullied her, she said: “Bullied by them all.”
The pair also raised concerns about Kirsten Oswald, the SNP’s business convener at the time and now the Scottish Government’s Victims’ Minister. They say she failed to record their resignation statement properly in the meeting minutes.
First Minister’s Questions
The two women watched from the public gallery on Wednesday as Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay raised their case. “Members of the SNP finance and audit committee blew the whistle but they were bullied into quitting after being refused access to basic information,” he said. He accused Swinney of going on the BBC twice to say the party’s finances were completely sound, and called him the “king of the SNP cover-up”.
Findlay asked if Swinney would apologise. Swinney replied that he had “apologised to members of the Scottish National Party for the events that have effected the party’s finances and I reiterate those today”. Later he said he had “apologised to all party members”. Pressed on whether he thought Sturgeon or other senior figures were bullies, he answered: “No, I don’t.”
On calls for an inquiry, Swinney turned the argument around. It was “the first time in living memory” that Findlay, a champion of victims, wanted an inquiry “into the victim of this particular case”, he said. “I have addressed the issues in the SNP’s finances and the SNP has got strong governance in place.”
Guthrie’s reaction
Guthrie said his response did not surprise her, because “that’s how they’ve got into the mess in the first place”. It shows, she said, “that they have learned nothing and they have not changed”. She has backed calls for a KC-led inquiry within the SNP.
“I believe in an independent Scotland and want an independent Scotland and this isn’t good enough,” she said. “John has to step up to the plate, grow some and start leading the country. It’s unsustainable.” Of Sturgeon, she said: “Nicola Sturgeon is rewriting history and she is creating a persona and a new life for herself.”
