Behind the SNP’s years of electoral dominance lay a tightly controlled partnership brought down by scandal and infighting Daily Telegraph 25/05/26 Early in the morning of April 5, 2023, dozens of officers descended on the suburban home shared by Nicola Sturgeon and her husband, Peter Murrell. They set up an evidence tent on the driveway while large blue sheets were used to shield the view of the garage and back garden. In astonishing scenes beamed on to television screens across Britain, police searched the house, using the tent and sheets to shield the items they removed from the watching cameras. Ms Sturgeon, who had been Scotland’s first minister only two months before, later said her house looked “like a murder scene”. Her husband, who had been the SNP’s chief executive for more than two decades, was arrested as part of the police investigation into embezzlement. He admitted to embezzling £400,000 from the party over 12 years at Edinburgh’s High Court on Monday. It is an ex...
Allister Heath - Sunday Telegraph The prospect of a new Labour leader should fill us all with dread. Amid the uncertainty surrounding Sir Keir Starmer’s replacement, there is one inevitability: taxes will increase, regardless of who’s in charge. If you are already sick of the crippling taxes levied on anything that moves (and much that doesn’t) in today’s Britain, I have grim news. The war on wealth has only just begun. There is very little hope of any improvement, at least under this Labour Government. The state of play is even bleaker than it was during the 1970s, when a class-war obsessed Labour Party dedicated itself to taxing the rich until the pips squeaked (as the then socialist Chancellor Denis Healey didn’t quite put it), levied confiscatory rates on high incomes, targeted “speculators” and sent the country into the arms of the IMF as a result. This time around, it’s not just the very wealthy that are in Labour’s sights, but almost anybody with assets or who wants to i...