The Sunday Post View: This eye-rubbing evidence begs far more questions than it answered

Report now with the PF on charges which leaves police twiddling their thumbs. So good time to be pressurising them. – Text from Peter Murrell, January 25, 2019.

I can see that the language that I used was open to misinterpretation. It was not about pressurising the police. – Peter Murrell to MSPs on Tuesday.

It’s hard to believe but that pearler wasn’t even close to being the most chin-scratching, eye-rubbing line in Mr Murrell’s evidence at Holyrood.

The official minute of the SNP’s chief executive’s appearance at parliament stretches to 59,079 words and, while many of Mr Murrell’s seemed to make perfect sense in the moment he said them, they became bewilderingly perplexing just a moment after that.

Insisting a text that could have not been clearer in suggesting it was a good time to pressurise police investigating claims of sexual harassment against Alex Salmond did not mean to suggest it was a good time to pressurise police investigating claims of sexual harassment against Alex Salmond was only the start. Mr Murrell went on to answer questions that were not asked, while leaving those that were floating in the dust motes and sceptical silence that followed many of his answers as the eyebrows of the committee members – at least those not in the SNP – inched higher.

Courteous and affable, Mr Murrell did not fluster or flap and is clearly a capable, thoughtful man who had given his evidence a deal of consideration. That is possibly why it is so notable his answers did not particularly help Nicola Sturgeon, his wife. Some might say it did the opposite.

Amongst other things – such as how the Scottish Government could ineptly crash a hugely sensitive investigation into a former First Minister before blowing up to £1 million fighting a judicial review it was almost certainly going to lose – this inquiry is examining the still slightly astonishing proposition that Mr Salmond was the victim of a conspiracy to bring him down and block his return to frontline politics.

The committee’s fearless band of SNP interrogators are clearly determined not to leave a single stone turned in their search for the truth but, nevertheless, this committee is making painful but painstaking progress driven by some of the most capable opposition MSPs.

Ms Sturgeon has some time to prepare before giving evidence in January but on some of the big stuff – what she told or did not tell parliament about misremembered, unminuted meetings which might or might not have been SNP-related or were possibly or possibly not strictly government business – it is hard to see her route to a convincing explanation.

It is not weaponising her husband, as the FM sniffed last week, to suggest that her forthcoming evidence may well echo his; calm, considered and apparently sensible while making not one bit of sense at all.