NICOLA Sturgeon possesses many gifts as a politician, one of them being luck. All things considered, if your husband really had to give evidence in a matter that might see the end of your career, then best it was done on the day the world’s first coronavirus vaccinations took place.

Between this historic event, and the cancellation of Highers next year, it was a good 16 minutes into a half- hour bulletin before BBC Reporting Scotland got round to the appearance of SNP chief executive Peter Murrell before a Holyrood inquiry. The committee is investigating the Scottish Government’s handling of harassment complaints against former First Minister Alex Salmond.

The story had been running since the morning, and several key pieces of evidence had been heard. Mr Murrell, the husband of Scotland’s First Minister, denied being part of a plot to bring about what committee member Jackie Baillie called the “downfall” of Mr Salmond.

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Mr Murrell told the inquiry that a 2018 meeting between Mr Salmond and Ms Sturgeon at the FM’s home was Scottish Government business and “not for me”.

Ms Sturgeon had told the Scottish Parliament it was party business. As such, no formal record was kept, as required by the ministerial code.

It was gripping stuff that in many another country at any other time would be leading the bulletins. It was what came next that made me truly splutter.

Committee member Alex Cole-Hamilton was having trouble with the notion that the Sturgeon-Murrells did not discuss why Mr Salmond had come calling. The way Mr Murrell told it, the marital home sounded like a place of sliding doors and shutters, literal or metaphorical, separating party business from state. The couple could speak about the former, but if the matter fell into the latter category the shutter came down like a guillotine.

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Mr Murrell said: “When she says that she can’t talk about something then that is the end of it and we move on to something else, like what book she is reading, or what I am going to make her for her tea, or whether she needs me to wash something.”

This, together with descriptions of his coming home to find people there but asking nothing about it, made Mr Murrell sound like Carson the butler in Downton Abbey (though I fancy the Jeeves of Yorkshire would at least have raised an eyebrow).

How could the head of a Government, and the chief executive of the party that formed said Government, find themselves in such an embarrassing bind? And what did it say about Scotland that this situation should have been accepted for so long?

In any other walk of life the marriage of the personal and professional would ring alarm bells. The food standards inspector does not give his wife’s restaurant the once-over. The accountant would not do the books for a company where his wife was chief executive.

But politics, we are asked to believe, is different. Such is the nature of the job, and the unsocial hours, different rules apply. Or so the theory goes. It was the same nonsense used to justify putting family members on the payroll. It did not wash then and it does not wash now.

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Even if the Sturgeon-Murrells observe a separation between party and Government business to the absolute letter, there is the question of how things look. Not great is the short answer. Even on the smallest body overseeing the most insignificant of business, a parish committee, say, you would have thought someone would have questioned the wisdom of the arrangement.

Mr Murrell has been chief executive of the SNP for 20 years. Ms Sturgeon was elected party leader and became First Minister in 2014. That is a long time to live with what many have considered a furore waiting to happen. It is hard to think a person of Mr Murrell’s abilities would have had difficulty finding another job outside the party, so why did he not?

Given that he did not change job one has to assume the couple and their advisers saw nothing wrong. Either that or they could not envisage a situation where their personal and professional lives might clash problematically. Well, welcome to that moment.

The fundamental issues here are transparency and accountability. Ms Sturgeon is accountable to the electorate, and parliament has a right to know what she does as a minister. It is not the same for Mr Murrell. We have, it is true, watched him come before a parliamentary committee to give evidence on oath. But how many times have any of us previously seen or heard him?

The same question of transparency arose again this week after another parliamentary inquiry, this one into the buying of two sorely-needed CalMac ferries. The Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee criticised the “lack of robust due diligence” on the part of Caledonian Asset Management Limited, the Scottish Government-owned firm that owns and procures ferries for use by CalMac.

It also highlighted a “complete lack of transparency” surrounding loans of £45m made to Ferguson Marine Engineering Limited, the firm that won the original £97 million contract, by the Scottish Government. As a result of a “catastrophic failure” to manage the process, the ferries will now be delivered years overdue and at twice the cost.

To the new bill of near £200 million one can add the £50 million given to the owners of BiFab. All to no avail after the Scottish Government withdrew its support, costing the Burntisland yard a contract to build turbine jackets for windfarms. Add also the half a million paid in costs to Mr Salmond after he showed the Government’s inquiry into claims made against him was “tainted by apparent bias”. Feel free to make your own additions to the tally.

All that money wasted. Cash so desperately needed elsewhere. Yet no-one says sorry or loses their job. Any way you look at it, this does not add up.

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