In your briefing today:

📣 Peter Murrell was sentenced to five years in jail after he admitted embezzling more than £400,000 from the Scottish National Party while he was its chief executive, in a crime spree that lasted 12 years. He used the money to buy everything from household staples to a campervan.

In the High Court in Edinburgh, Lord Young told the estranged husband of Nicola Sturgeon that was guilty of a “calculated crime of dishonesty” and a “significant breach of trust”. Murrell’s plea in mitigation offered no explanation for his crimes, only an expression of remorse. (Guardian)

📣 Prime Minister Keir Starmer and pretender to the crown Andy Burnham have had a “frosty” meeting to discuss the transition of power, and the PM has granted him access to the civil service so the newly elected MP can prepare. He could get the keys to Number 10 within weeks. (Guardian)

📣 Come on Scotland! Steve Clarke’s men take on Brazil tonight in Miami, and it’s being touted as the national team’s biggest game in history.

A draw would almost certainly secure qualification to the second stage of the World Cup for the first time. A win would send the country into a collective frenzy the likes of which haven’t been seen since… 1978?

But even a defeat - as long as it’s not a thumping - could see us go through: some third-placed teams will qualify, and we already have three precious points under our belts. The only problem is we wouldn’t learn if we’d qualified until the weekend. (Daily Record)

The anxiety starts here.

📣 Transgender prisoners are being moved to jails appropriate for their biological sex after the Scottish government confirmed it would not appeal a court ruling. (BBC)

📣 River City actor Iain Robertson has been found guilty of rape and sexual assault. (STV)

📣 Newspaper editors - including yours truly - have urged journalists to ignore the Scottish Parliament “pen”. (Daily Record)

📣 A Palestinian refugee has refused a reward for returning a wallet, lost in Edinburgh, which contained more than £1,000. (Daily Record)

📣 It’s going to be as hot as hell today across a swathe of the UK, with a very rare red extreme heat warning taking effect for parts of England and Wales from 9am until tomorrow evening. The warning signals a danger to life across some of the most populous areas of the country. (BBC - live coverage)

📣 A huge review into maternity services in Nottingham is likely to reveal extensive failings that lead to the deaths of multiple babies and inflicted avoidable harm on families. (Independent)

📣 All trains in Germany ground to a halt last night because of a tech fault: they’re running again now. (DW.com)

⚽️ England served up a catatonically dull 0-0 draw against Ghana last night and really should have had a penalty awarded against them late in the second half after a kung-fu-style challenge from Ezri Konsa, but are still on track to qualify. (Report & “highlights”)

⚽️ FIFA World Cup games today:

🗣️ How will Andy Burnham deal with Scotland? The now-former Mayor of Manchester is, of course, a fan of English devolution, having spent nine years living that particular dream. He’s had plenty to say about the constitution in his time in that job - including directly about Scotland (of which more in a moment).

Now he has marched on Westminster and looks likely to become Prime Minister by - at the latest - the end of the summer; we get to wonder if the government’s position on Scotland might shift.

The Scottish Parliament has the biggest-ever pro-independence majority, which, only last month, passed a motion calling for the powers to be granted, allowing it - not Westminster - to call another referendum on independence.

That was, of course, rejected by Downing Street. And it would be hard to imagine Burnham looking to offer a different response to Keir Starmer on that sort of request. He’s on the record as calling nationalism “divisive.”

But that doesn’t mean the putative Prime Minister thinks today’s constitutional arrangements are fit for purpose, either. Indeed, an oft-repeated refrain from Burnham is that Britain’s current constitutional arrangements need to be “completely rewired”.

As the Express noted this week, in 2022 Burnham spoke at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and said: “I recognise that there’s a reason why Scotland is as it is, feels as it does. There’s a reason why, here in the North, there’s a lot of frustration about Westminster politics.

“And that’s because the current electoral system that we’ve got at a UK level puts power in too few hands, it gives too much power to vested interests, to big business and to the media. And it skews politics. It’s too oriented down there and doesn’t think enough about up here.”

That rewiring, he suggested then, would be “proportional representation for the Commons, a Senate of the nations and regions elected to replace the House of Lords. Much more devolution out of the whole thing, as close as you can get to home rule for Scotland, I would say.”

He also said back then that Scotland’s biggest cities could also have elected mayors.

The National also reports today that Burnham said he wanted to “tear up” the funding mechanism - the Barnett Formula - in a 2024 book called Head North, co-authored with Liverpool mayor Steve Rotheram.

It would be reasonable to treat all of this with caution. Comments in the balmy festival atmosphere four years ago could be dismissed as crowd pleasers designed to evaporate in the late-summer warmth. The context of that book was a better financial settlement for Manchester. His priorities as PM might change.

And as The Scotsman noted yesterday, it’s fair to say Burnham lacks a policy view on a number of key areas.

But Burnham does have the potential to reshape political debate across the UK, according to University of Edinburgh policy academic Professor James Mitchell. Speaking to The Sunday Post this week, he noted: “One of the interesting things in his victory statement was about empowering regions. That should have resonance not just in the English regions but in Wales and Scotland. I think that is now very much on the agenda.”

Burham’s views, he said, echod concerns raised in Gordon Brown’s review of the UK’s future, completed before Labour entered government. That called for deep reform of UK institutions to tackle an over-concentration of power in Westminster and Whitehall.

Caveats to all this should apply. Criticism, or the simple scale of the work required for reform, could put him off.

But it is also clear we have a potential Prime Minister who has talked, and likely thought, more about constitutional change in the UK - its purpose and the desired outcome - more than many of our Prime Ministers in recent years.

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