Why did the lord advocate brief Swinney on Murrell charge?

The release of 30 previously confidential updates from the Crown Office to Scotland's first ministers over the last three decades is unprecedented.

The files, published on Tuesday, cover everything from the Lockerbie bombing investigation to a man who was jailed for rambling naked through the countryside.

Many contain information that was not in the public domain at the time, but none were as politically sensitive as the memos sent to John Swinney on the prosecution of his party's old boss.

On 20 March last year, Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain told Swinney that Peter Murrell had appeared in court, charged with embezzling "over £460,000" from the SNP, many months before there was any prospect of that sum entering the public domain.

She gave a more exact figure of £459,046.49 in another memo sent on 19 January this year, the day the indictment was served on the party's former chief executive and weeks before the charges were published by the Scottish Sun newspaper.

Last week the Crown Office said the sum was included in the 19 January minute because: "Once an indictment has been served on an accused it stands to become public at any time."

That is theoretically the case but why was the first minister briefed on the financial scale of the allegations against Nicola Sturgeon's estranged husband, 10 months before the indictment was served?

In a letter to the Scottish Parliament's presiding officer, the lord advocate writes that the practice of providing updates to Scottish and UK governments pre-dates devolution in 1999.

She says: "On many occasions, this will involve prosecutors properly sharing information with the government which is not in the public domain at the time it is shared or will not be made public."

The lord advocate explains that much of that information is passed on to remind ministers of the need to take care with what they say, to avoid harming the legal process and finding themselves in contempt of court.

Crown Office officials advised her on two occasions that it was appropriate to provide "limited factual information" on Peter Murrell's case.

"The value of the alleged financial offence was included on each occasion to provide factual confirmation of a matter on which there had been substantial publicity and speculation in the media during the police investigation, namely the scope and monetary value of the alleged offence," she says.

The memo from 20 March 2025 also says significant information about the investigation into two other individuals would be made public that day.

She was referring to the announcement from police that Nicola Sturgeon and ex-SNP treasurer Colin Beattie, both of whom had been arrested, questioned and released without charge, were no longer under investigation by Operation Branchform, the inquiry into the party's funding and finances.

The lord advocate provided John Swinney with another noteworthy detail: "Nicola Sturgeon MSP and Colin Beattie MSP were not reported to the procurator fiscal for prosecution.

"Crown counsel (senior Crown Office lawyers) have considered the police request for advice in relation to them and consider the police were right not to report them for prosecution. The police will now communicate that information to them."

The publication of the case updates provides a glimpse into the breadth of work carried out by the Crown Office, and its assessment of what the government of the day should know about.

Putting the memos on Operation Branchform to one side, recent examples include information on prosecutions linked to the proscribed group Palestine Action and the raiding of a drugs lab where a deadly synthetic opioid was discovered.

Others covered the arrest of a Ukrainian war refugee who was accused of making threats against Donald Trump and the court appearances of eight people accused of vandalising the US president's golf resort at Turnberry, South Ayrshire.

In 2022, a memo updated Nicola Sturgeon on the investigation into the deaths of William Lindsay and Katie Allan at HMP Polmont, telling her that Crown lawyers believed there had been a breach of the Health and Safety at Work Act.

Two years earlier, she was given a detailing briefing after police shot dead a Sudanese asylum seeker who attacked people at a hotel in Glasgow.

The Crown Office also provided Nicola Sturgeon with updates on the Lockerbie investigation, the inquiry into the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland and a young woman who had left Glasgow to join ISIS in Syria.

She was told about the results of a post mortem on 88-year-old Janet McKay, who was found dead eight days after she went missing, the death of Sheku Bayoh in police custody, and the decision not to prosecute the driver of the bin lorry which crashed in Glasgow in 2014, killing six people.

In 2014, first minister Alex Salmond was copied into letters from the then Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland KC to Prime Minister David Cameron, warning Number 10 that public comment over the conviction of ex-News of the World editor Andy Coulson might prejudice criminal proceedings in Scotland.

Alex Salmond was also told about inquiries into allegations of historic sex abuse at Fort Augustus Abbey, the murder of a Thai woman at the SECC in Glasgow and the history of a man who was being arrested due to "his unwillingness to wear clothes in public whilst in Scotland."

The oldest memo to a first minister released by the Crown dates from 2004, when Scottish Labour leader Jack McConnell was notified there was insufficient evidence that a criminal offence had been committed during the treatment of haemophiliacs.

The release by the Crown of the 20 March memo on Peter Murrell's case has turned up the political heat on Dorothy Bain, who's held the dual role of head of the prosecution service and chief legal advisor to the Scottish government since 2021.

All of the updates concerned cases of major public interest - even that of the naked rambler - but only two involved alleged crimes committed against the party of government. That is why she is under such pressure.

It is worth noting that recent lord advocates have typically stepped down after five years and, long before this row erupted, it was widely expected that she would leave the role after the Scottish parliamentary elections in May.