In your briefing today:

📣 Former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell has admitted embezzling more than £400,000 from the party, buying luxury goods, jewellery, vehicles and groceries over 12 years of fraud. Murrell, estranged husband of former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, was handcuffed and led from the dock of the High Court in Edinburgh. He spent the night in prison and faces a lengthy jail term when he is sentenced next month. (BBC)

📣 MSPs will vote on plans for a second independence referendum later today. First Minister John Swinney is expected to formally request the transfer of powers from Westminster to Holyrood to allow the referendum to be held, before a vote which he is expected to win. However, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said he will block the move. (BBC) (Holyrood)

📣 Deal or no deal? It’s far from clear how talks between Iran and the US have progressed, with the two sides issuing conflicting versions of what’s happening.

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📣 The Scottish Government is being urged to reinstate the role of women’s health minister, after it was abolished in John Swinney’s new-look government, appointed last week. (Scotsman)

📣 A body has been found in the search for an American tourist who went missing while walking in Glencoe. (Mail)

📣 Scotland’s largest indoor shopping centre in East Kilbride collapsed owing more than £114 million - and a proposed sale has fallen through. (Herald has the exclusive)

📣 Former DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson is set to go on trial for alleged sex offences later today, in a case that has sent shockwaves through Northern Irish politics. Donaldson, 63, is charged with rape, gross indecency and other sexual offences over 21 years. His wife, Eleanor Donaldson, 60, is charged with aiding and abetting rape and indecent assault. Both have pleaded not guilty. (Guardian)

📣 Russia has warned foreign citizens to leave Kyiv and has threatened a “systematic” attack on Ukraine’s capital, after heavy attacks on the city in recent days. (Independent)

📣 England could break the May heat record again today, with temperatures of 35 °C expected in some areas later. The record was broken yesterday, when parts of London hit 34.8 °C. (BBC)

⚽️ St Mirren successfully defended their top-flight status by beating Partick Thistle in the Premiership relegation play-off final. The Paisley side won 1-0 in the second leg last night, after a 1-1 draw last week. (Report & 🎥 highlights)

⚽️ Having led Celtic to an extraordinary double after his two-legged rescue act this season, Martin O’Neill is starting to think of the future, with talk of him getting the job (again) permanently, or moving upstairs into an ambassadorial role. It appears there’s much still to be worked out. (Scotsman)

⚽️ Hearts captain Lawrence Shankland is expected to complete his move to Rangers today after he undergoes a medical. (Mail)

⚽️ Ouch. AC Milan have described their season, in which they failed to qualify for the Champions League, as an “unequivocal failure”, and sacked head coach Massimiliano Allegri. (BBC)

🗣️ An air of disbelief surrounded Peter Murrell’s guilty plea yesterday at the High Court of Edinburgh. Yes, many people suspected he might eventually plead guilty. But the admission and the detail that accompanied his plea provoked genuine surprise.

And no, this is not the sort of faux shock journalists and politicians wheel out to greet entirely expected outcomes. Even after all the long Branchform investigations, and all the revelations that led to today, seeing it laid out in page after page of documentation still left many speechless.

Why so?

There was his proximity to power, of course. Married to Nicola Sturgeon, who eventually became First Minister but held senior government roles for most of their married life, Murrell was chief executive of the SNP from the relative obscurity of 2001 through its rise and all its years of power until 2023.

He was at the heart of a new Scottish establishment. He grew up in the party alongside John Swinney - with whom he’d been in the Boys’ Brigade in Edinburgh - worked for Alex Salmond, and was integral to the SNP’s biggest wins from 2007 on, winning a reputation as a formidable election organiser.

Mike Wade remembers an impressive manager: “Murrell was an enabler,” he writes, “whose skill was to give newcomers space to express themselves and put their ideas into practice, even those who were not party members. “He’s the best chief executive I’ve ever worked with,” one of his contractors told Wade.

Then there is the sheer scale of the offending and the vast breach of trust it represented. This wasn’t a simple question of a few dodgy transactions made in a panic: the crimes spanned many years, and Murrell worked hard - with false receipts - to cover his tracks.

That’s why, when police stepped up their investigation in April 2023, they raided the home of Murrell and Sturgeon and pitched “the most controversial tent in Scottish policing history” in the front garden: their investigation had to be, literally, forensic, involving vast amounts of potential evidence and the sifting of possessions.

That raid prompted fury at the time among some supporters of the SNP who regarded it as unnecessary and heavy-handed: a “grotesque spectacle”, in the words of former SNP spin doctor Murray Foote. “It is inconceivable to me that Peter would so much as consider doing something dodgy lest it rebound and put his wife in jeopardy,” he wrote at the time. That faith among those close to Murrell at the time, now betrayed, explains some of the shock today.

Finally, of course, there’s what Murrell actually did with the money. We knew some of the “highlights”: the bigger-ticket items - the motorhome, of course, but also a Jaguar car, expensive glassware and ever-more-costly coffee machines. But the BBC has the best-organised and most comprehensive list of everything: a remarkable catalogue which suggests that Murrell had simply started to view the SNP’s money as his own: big tubs of Nescafé, video games, books, chopsticks, toilet rolls and much more.

Murrell wakes in HMP Edinburgh, better known as Saughton Prison, this morning, if he managed to sleep at all. As the Daily Record (£) notes, he’s banged up with some of Scotland’s most notorious criminals: killers and a number of those convicted of violence relating to last year’s gang war across central Scotland. Wherever he’s been since his first arrest, it’ll be a stark contrast to the life he has enjoyed until now.

Next month, at sentencing, we can expect Murrell’s lawyer to make a plea in mitigation: to tell something of a story to explain his crimes and maybe reduce the punishment. Maybe we will learn more of his motivation then.

Today’s Times poses the question: Who is Peter Murrell? Quite a few of those who have known him for many years will be asking the same thing for years to come.

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