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The fast and the furious

‘How can it be authentic if they don’t know the real Amy?’: Why didn’t Winehouse biopic makers ask us about her, say friends

by www.dailymail.co.uk Leave a Comment

Friends of Amy Winehouse are furious with the makers of an upcoming biopic for failing to consult them about the star’s life.

They claim that executives working on Back To Black have not been in touch to ask about their memories of the late singer, raising fears that the film will be inaccurate.

One told The Mail on Sunday that they are also unhappy at the casting of Marisa Abela – star of the BBC ’s risqué drama Industry – because, despite the near perfect wig she wears and the identical tattoos, they do not think she looks like the Rehab singer.

They also contrast Roedean-educated Ms Abela’s social background with London-born Ms Winehouse, who was known for her streetwise persona.

Friends of Winehouse claim that executives working on Back To Black haven’t been in touch to ask about their memories of the late singer, raising fears that the film will be inaccurate

‘Nobody consulted us about Amy,’ said the friend. ‘How can it be authentic and accurate if they don’t know the real Amy or the truth about what happened in her final years? We are against this and we are upset. Amy was absolutely striking.’

Despite it being almost 12 years since Ms Winehouse was found unresponsive at her townhouse in Camden, North London, in July 2011, her grief-stricken friends still believe it is early for such a film to be made. However, movies about late stars have been released sooner. I Wanna Dance With Somebody, a film telling the life story of pop star Whitney Houston, who died a year later, in 2012, is currently in cinemas.

Sources on the set of Back To Black – directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson and named after Ms Winehouse’s hit 2006 album – say that filming is only due to last eight weeks, which industry insiders believe is not very long for such a production.

Pictured: The actress with her mother Caroline Gruber

One insider said: ‘It all feels very fast, almost a bit smash and grab.’

They also questioned how the paparazzi were presented during scenes filmed last week.

Onlookers say photographers were depicted as being aggressive towards Ms Winehouse, while in reality the pop star, who was 27 when she died, had a respectful relationship with them and grew to be friendly with some.

Eddie Marsan will star in the film as the singer’s father Mitch and Jack O’Connell as her husband Blake Fielder-Civil.

Miss Abela, 26, who is also set to appear in Greta Gerwig’s new Barbie movie, due to be released in July, had originally planned to go to university to become a human rights lawyer.

Mitch Winehouse and Amy Winehouse backstage during The BRIT Awards 2008

However, she changed her mind at the last minute, instead deciding to attend drama school Rada to follow in the footsteps of her mother, the actress Caroline Gruber. Both mother and daughter have raised eyebrows in their acting careers – Miss Abela in her risqué sex and drugs scenes in Industry, where she plays City worker Yasmin Kara-Hanani, and Ms Gruber in comedy show Heil Honey I’m Home!, in which Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun move next door to a Jewish couple.

The series – described as ‘the world’s most tasteless situation comedy’ – was cancelled in 1990 after just one episode.

Although Miss Abela attended the £20,000-a-year Roedean school in Brighton, East Sussex, she grew up in a modest semi-detached bungalow with her mother.

Los Angeles airport passenger OPENS door of moving plane and flees on deployed slide

by www.mirror.co.uk Leave a Comment

A plane passenger terrifyingly fled the moving aircraft by breaking out the emergency door while it was taxiing on the runway.

Passengers and crew aboard Delta airlines flight 1714 bound for Seattle were baffled on Saturday when a passenger got up and furiously run along the cabin corridor as the plane was taking off from Los Angeles International Airport.

In a bizarre scene, the man reportedly ran from the back of the plane to the front and frantically told the flight attendant “what do I do now?”

The staff member ordered him to sit down, but before they approached him, he ran to one of the plane’s emergency exit doors and opened it by turning the latch.

The man was taken to a hospital for mental evaluation (

Image:

Fox11)

He then slid down the deployed emergency slide, landing on the back of a baggage cart, Fox News reported.

Luggage workers held him down until police arrived, and took him to a hospital for a mental evaluation.

The plane, a Boeing 737, returned to the gate and all other passengers were put on a new plane to take off.

A passenger praised the airline and crew members for their handling of the situation.

The Los Angeles airport passenger opened the emergency door and slid down (

Image:

Fox11)

Gillian Sheldon, who was on the plane and witnessed the incident, said: “Delta was great. The flight attendants were amazing.”

She added that the whole thing happened so fast that no one had any time to react.

“You always tell yourself, when you see these things on TV, that I would have done this or that, but honestly, it was so quick, there was no way to react,” she said.

Other passengers praised the Delta crew members for their handling of the situation (

Image:

AFP via Getty Images)

“Just glad it didn’t happen when we were midair, or it would have been a whole different outcome.”

No injuries were reported during the incident.

In a statement, the FAA said: “Customers are being reaccommodated on a new aircraft and we apologize for the inconvenience and delay in their travel plans.”

Footage shared on social media by one of the other passengers shows the man handcuffed on the tarmac as police hold him back.

In a statement following the incident, Delta airlines said: “Delta flight 1714 operating from Los Angeles to Seattle returned to the gate due to an unruly passenger.

Police were called to the scene and the man was taken to a hospital (

Image:

Fox11)

“The aircraft was holding to taxi for takeoff when the passenger exited the aircraft and was initially detained by Delta staff ahead of being arrested by local law enforcement.

“Customers are being reaccommodated on a new aircraft and we apologize for the inconvenience and delay in their travel plans.”

An investigation into the incident by the FAA is ongoing and the FBI was also notified about the incident.

Los Angeles Airport Police Captain Karla Rodriguez said: “Due to the circumstances, FBI has been notified. The aircraft was returned to a gate and passengers are in the process of being deplaned in order to be transported in another aircraft so that they can continue with their flight plans.”

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‘Succession’ Season 4, Episode 1 Review: Rummage Sale

by www.forbes.com Leave a Comment

Succession is back for its fourth and final season and that makes me both tremendously happy and a little bit sad. Happy to get one more delicious season of family drama, backstabbing and plotting that makes House Of The Dragon almost look tame by comparison; sad that it’s almost over, of course. I could handle a couple more seasons of Succession.

In any case, there’s blood in the water. Logan Roy is making his last gambit and the sharks are circling. Who will end up sitting on the Iron Waystar RoyCo Throne? Who will bend the knee? Let’s talk about it.

The Revenge Of The Kids

When we left off at the end of Season 3, Logan Roy (Brian Cox) had just made a surprise play. After meeting with GoJo creator Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgard) the Roy patriarch decided that now was the time to sell rather than acquire. Matsson would take over both companies—instead of one of Roy’s idiot children—and Logan would walk away wealthy and content.

When they heard of the news, Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Shiv (Sarah Snook) rushed to stop their father, perhaps irrationally worried that the sale would leave them mere billionaires rather than powerbrokers at a major media company.

Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) betrayed his wife and brothers-in-law to Logan, possibly in order to gain status and job security in the company’s future; but more likely just to get back at Shiv for all of her betrayals and the pain she’s caused him since the dawn of their marriage.

The kids were screwed, traitors in their father’s eyes, and cast out of the fold once and for all.

Fast forward to the Season 4 premiere. The kids have been busy. While normal people might take the billions of dollars they’re about to earn from a massive sale of their father’s company and just . . . live on a beach somewhere enjoying their fabulous wealth and earning tidy returns on the stock market, these three are malcontents. They’re in the process of starting up a new media company called The Hundred which is, according to Kendall, “Substack meets masterclass meets the Economist meets The New Yorker.” It’s a “private members club but for everyone” and “an indispensable bespoke information hub” that offers “high-calorie info-snacks” with the “ethos of a nonprofit but the path to crazy margins.”

I’m dying. Like so much of Succession ’s absurdity, it all feels too real sometimes.

The Hundred is something all three kids love and are enormously enthusiastic about right up until they discover that dad is trying, once again, to get his grubby little paws on Pierce Global Media. They quickly realize that with the company’s value more than halved since the last time Logan tried—and failed—to buy it, that with money from the Waystar Royco sale, they could actually buy Pierce out from under him, especially since Pierce matriarch Nan Pierce (Cherry Jones) hates Logan with a fiery passion.

And so The Hundred is dropped like one of Kendall’s girlfriends and off they rush to buy a dying legacy media brand. Partly this is animus, a desire to screw over Logan; partly it’s cowardice, because none of the Roy children are at all confident that they can build anything remotely as grand and profitable as their father’s business. When it all comes down, you can’t really blame them for either.

They meet with Nan who is every bit as conniving and money-and-status-obsessed as the Roy family, but too concerned with her image to just admit it. She constantly refers to a bidding war as “disgusting” and pretends that she hates the entire business and all this gross money talk—while doing her damndest to get the very best price possible.

In the end, she chooses the kids over Logan, once they make her an offer she can’t refuse (of a cool, even $10 billion). When Logan tries to go higher, he’s shut down. Nan is content. She’s walking away with a ridiculous amount of money and a punch to Logan’s kidney.

Both Kendall and Shiv are thrilled. Roman . . . not so much. The smartest of the Roy children, and the most loyal to their father, Roman might be remembering all the many ways his siblings have been beaten by dad. Logan doesn’t lose. And even though he tells ‘the rats’ “Congratulations on saying the biggest number” it’s far from a concession speech. Logan always has another card up his sleeve. He beat Kendall while still recovering from a massive stroke. He’ll find some way to screw over his children in the end.

The Munsters & The Birthday Party

While the kids plot their revenge, Logan suffers a birthday once again. The show opened up on Logan’s 80th birthday, so it’s only fitting that now—three seasons and nearly five years later—we get to watch him grit his teeth at “Happy Birthday To You” being sung by “the Munsters” as he calls his too-happy guests. ( Breaking Bad opened on Walter White’s birthday and began its final season with his birthday as well, interestingly enough).

The real star of the birthday party, however, is hapless cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) who brings an unannounced date, something that Logan is clearly unhappy about, immediately sending his assistant and probably-lover Carrie (Zoe Winters) to grill poor Greg about her credentials. Later, Tom approaches Greg to tell him he’s the laughing stock of the entire party for bringing such a grotesque plebe to the private affair. She’s stuffing her face at the buffet table, taking pictures of everyone, and carrying around a “ludicrously capacious bag” as Tom puts it, that would be better-suited to a bank robbery than a fancy party.

But Greg insists that his date Bridget (Francesca Root-Dodson) is “a firecracker” and “crunchy peanut butter” and another rung on his dating ladder. He brags later to Tom that they snuck into a guest room and the two of them had “a bit of a rummage” around in one another’s pants. Tom, always looking out for a chance to prank his best buddy, tells the ever-gullible Greg that Logan has cameras in every room and will surely watch the footage later (as though he has the time) and that Greg must confess before that happens. So, in the midst of Logan’s furious dealings with his children, in the middle of a high-stakes acquisition bid, Greg fails to read the room once again and asks his uncle for a private chat.

The result? Logan ousts poor Bridget from the party (something he should have done when she asked for a selfie). Logan’s top security guy / bodyguard Colin (Scott Nicholson) informs Greg that he’ll need to search her on the way out and Greg decides he’ll just hang back rather than break the news to his date. “I don’t want to see what happens in Guantanamo,” he says nervously, backing up the stairs, before uttering the Greggiest of lines: “Do your ways and god be willing.”

Greg and Tom really do get the very best lines in the show, don’t they?

Speaking of Tom, the ATN chief approaches his father-in-law at the party with both good news and a tough question that he dances painfully around. He wants to know, basically, if he and Logan will be good if he and Shiv don’t make it. Their marriage has only ever been on the rocks and it’s reached full trial separation now that Tom stabbed her in the back over the GoJo deal. “What would happen were a marriage such as mine, and even, in fact, mine, were to falter to the point of failure?” Tom asks.

Logan, exasperated more by the length of time it took Tom to ask it than by the question itself, replies vaguely: “If we’re good, we’re good.”

Logan bails from the party at one point, heading out with Colin to a diner where he tells his bodyguard that he’s a good man, a pal, Logan’s best pal in fact. “Thank you, sir,” Colin replies. I suppose it’s easy to have a best pal that just works for you, does everything you say without talking back, is fiercely loyal and isn’t trying to get your job or your company. But it doesn’t make him a friend in any true sense of the word. But then, Logan doesn’t really think of people that way. He tells Colin that people are just “economic units” and when they die they simply cease to exist within the markets that make up everything. Like tears in the rain.

As for the afterlife: “I think this is it. Realistically.” Nothing awaits him and you can’t take it with you, but Logan will be damned if he gives up one red cent.

This Is The End, Beautiful Friend

Back in Tom and Shiv’s spacious apartment, Shiv shows up to collect some of her things. She’s been staying in hotels, jetting around the globe and so forth. When Tom says he thought she had all her favorite things, she replies “I don’t like to be restricted to my favorites.” Ah, indeed you don’t, Shiv. Heaven forbid.

Tom, it seems, has been “dating models”—a fact that Shiv finds enormously distasteful despite their open relationship being her idea from day one. Shiv has always been fine cheating, just not being cheated on even during a separation. She tells Tom she hears he and Greg are referring to themselves as the “Disgusting Brothers” and he replies that they go out for drinks from time to time.

When Shiv says it’s time to move on from the marriage, all Tom can say is “uh huh.” He tried to talk to her about his feelings but she shut him down, as usual. He offers to have “try to make love” with her, but she shoots that down, too, but she doesn’t want to leave and she doesn’t want him to leave, and they fall back on the bed, exhausted and hold hands.

It’s a surprisingly moving moment, but then every time Tom lets his hokey façade fall away, and reveals the vulnerable man underneath—eager to be loved and to give love, in pain over the lack of love he’s being shown—Macfadyen’s acting chops shine through. His performance as Tom has been a true masterclass. Some of the finest acting I’ve ever seen, and this in a show filled with brilliant, powerful performances.

The 1%

Finally, we come to the last of the Roy children. Connor Roy (Alan Ruck) rubs shoulders with birthday guests, his fiancé Willa (Justine Lupe) at his side. We learn that he is polling at 1% (a fitting number for a member of the 1%) and that his advisors say he needs to spend $100 million more just to stay at 1%, which even he realizes is absurd. Willa says sure, but if he spent that he’d still be wealthy, and he nods and laughs.

Later, he comes up with a brilliant idea to save money: A wedding under the Statue of Liberty, with a brass band and bum fights and, “You know, hoopla and rassmatazz!” to which Willa responds that she always her wedding being nice. She’s already not living her storybook life as an escort marrying her best client and a failed playwright. It’s insult to injury imagining a wedding designed to court voters and media buzz. Reminder: This is still the healthiest and most functional romantic relationship of the entire show.

Verdict

There’s nothing really new here but that’s just fine. More plotting and intrigue. More revenge. In many ways, this feels very much like a cyclical moment, a turning of the wheel back to the beginning. We have the birthday, we have the kids plotting against their father, we have Logan preparing to fight back. Tom and Shiv were just getting engaged back in Season 1, now their marriage is (apparently) coming to an end. Greg has risen up in the ranks of the Roy family and Waystar RoyCo but he’s learned nothing. Everything is different and nothing is.

Like my other favorite show at the moment— Yellowjackets— one of the enduring themes of Succession is that people really don’t change. Shiv is still a self-centered know-it-all who thinks she’s a good person. Kendall is still a cocky leader who nobody wants to follow. Logan is still an old battle-axe who lives for the fight and nothing else. Roman, perhaps more than anyone, has grown and evolved, but he still lives under the shadow of his family and still suffers from all the weird hang-ups that constantly hold him back. Tom remains a fish out of water despite all his success.

And I am still enjoying the hell out of this show. What about you? What did you think? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook .

As always, I’d love it if you’d follow me here on this blog and subscribe to my YouTube channel and my Substack so you can stay up-to-date on all my TV, movie and video game reviews and coverage. Thanks!

Edward Albee Takes Us to the Edge: Review of ‘At Home at the Zoo’

by www.thedailybeast.com Leave a Comment

Edward Albee ’s At Home at the Zoo seems such a complete piece of theater it is surprising to consider that 46 years separates the creation of its first and second act, which are in themselves two separate one-act plays.

A wonderfully acted and polished production at New York City’s Pershing Square Signature Center , directed by Lila Neugebauer, makes the two halves, the play itself, cohere brilliantly.

Albee —most famous for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , and who died in 2016, at 88­—wrote the first part, Homelife , in 2004, as a companion piece to his debut play, The Zoo Story (1958, first performed in 1959).

That original story features the tense, and ultimately terrible, encounter between languid publishing executive Peter (Robert Sean Leonard) and needling itinerant Jerry (Paul Sparks) on a bench in Central Park. The first half of the play features Jerry at home with his wife, Ann (Katie Finneran). Albee ’s pen portraits of the characters are delicious in themselves.

Peter is described as “45.

Albee felt, he told The Boston Globe in 2011 , that the original play had “one and a half characters. Jerry is a fully developed, three-dimensional character. But Peter is a backboard. He’s not fully developed. Peter had to be more fleshed out.’’

In the latest production, all seems well in Peter and Ann’s middle-class world. The only hint of dysfunction or mystery comes courtesy of the Andrew Lieberman’s stage design. The “home” here is an enclosed, mostly white space, an undecorated comfortable jail with only one way out. It is not domestic in any recognizable way, bar the chair Peter is sitting in, while reading a book for work when Ann comes in to disturb him, to ask him something.

The walls and floor are dotted with a furious mélange of what look like punctuation marks, or the imprints of dead, exploded insects. The same design recurs in Act II, peppered around a set of benches that is supposed to be Central Park, with again only one way in and one way out.

The play opens with both silence and the couple not communicating properly. Beckett springs to mind, and of course Albee himself (Albee talked about Beckett’s influence on him ). This couple are in their own worlds, in the same house, lives progressing uneventfully down the same tracks and on different tracks that don’t seem to imperil them both.

The couple reflect on their lives, the ease of their lives, their comfort; there is lackadaisical badinage about the kids, not getting a dog, microwaves. They have two children, two cats, two parakeets, but Ann wonders about her husband’s warm and accepting passivity, and why he never quizzes her on her night-time walks.

Leonard is excellent as the husband unwilling to be stirred, rumpled and benign, and Finneran is just as natural as his first chivvier and disturbance on this Sunday afternoon. What does she have to do to get a response? She gets his attention by remarking she might get her breasts cut off as a preventive measure against cancer.

She says she watches him sleep, temporarily paralyzed in unconsciousness, and wonders how vulnerable he is to “doom” approaching—as it is about to in the park in Act II. It strikes you that Ann portends Jerry in some ways: Inside and soon outside his home, Peter is at the mercy of two destabilizing forces with very different intents at the heart of their gyres.

Peter confesses his own worries; much to his wife’s amusement, he is convinced his circumcised foreskin has returned to his body.

Ann thinks they don’t rely on each other for the things that truly disturb and hurt them. Peter just thinks he has no “jagged edges.”

He still doesn’t know why Ann came in to disturb him earlier, and she doesn’t either. But she confesses her worry that neither of them in themselves are “sufficient” for life. Peter thought they wanted a quiet life, “smooth sailing.” Ann won’t let him off the hook and tells him he’s terrible in bed, that she’d like it if they fucked “like strangers—a regular one-shot deal, like you’ll never see each other again.”

Peter tells a timely story about a college sexual experience, about a girl who said “Hurt me” to him during sex, which he did, leading to a hospital visit for her.

“A little madness, wouldn’t that be good?” Ann says of their marriage. The chaos they imagine is a home suddenly blowing up, the cats eating the parakeets. How funny, they laugh.

Peter heads out to read in the park and encounters crazy-looking Jerry. Quite early on in their encounter, you are screaming internally for Peter to get the hell out of there. We can see what he cannot. Why, you wonder, is Peter so myopic? He is about to pay handsomely for it.

Jerry inveigles Peter into intimacy-sharing conversation. He is the chaos that will enter Jerry’s life, the unwanted chaos, the presence that will mean anything but “smooth sailing,” the very walking embodiment of walls blown out and cats eating parakeets.

Sparks is so good as Jerry that he puts the audience on edge immediately, even as all Jerry is doing is trying to get Peter to talk. We can see his craziness has purpose. We can see he wants to drive Peter to something.

Jerry talks about his sad life: his room in a chaotic boardinghouse, and the comparison is stark next to Peter’s comfortable home. He talks about sex, a horny landlady, and—centrally—a vicious dog that he describes and then embodies transfixingly: “a black monster of a beast: an oversized head, tiny, tiny ears, and eyes… bloodshot, infected, maybe; and a body you can see the ribs through the skin.”

The saga of Jerry and the dog is the central saga of the play. Its conclusion has a near-echo, perhaps, to Ann and Peter’s marriage, or at least a warning the emotionally careless Peter should hear: “The dog and I have attained a compromise, more of a bargain, really. We neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach each other.”

Leonard’s emotional response to this insane story, told insanely, is beautifully registered: moved, panicked, suddenly afraid. Jerry starts physically jabbing at him, almost off the bench they are sharing, as he tells him what happened at the zoo.

“I’m crazy, you bastard,” Jerry tells Peter.

Yes, the audience thinks as one. We knew that. Peter, get the hell out of there. But Peter does not, and the two men fight for ownership of the bench. You flash back to Ann, her desire for chaos and to stir her husband. Jerry is now stirring him, goading him to action. Here is Peter stirred. It is terrifying. He is terrified. What price passivity? What price action?

Suddenly, to this audience member, the dots and dashes littering the stage made sense. This is the chaos underneath Peter’s everyday that he cannot, will not see. The lack of exits on stage are the lack of exits available to him, again invisible to him.

In the final cataclysm of the play we see how fast and devastatingly humans can be pushed to their limits. Where, Albee leaves you wondering, is the exit?

Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo: Homelife & The Zoo Story is at the Signature Theatre until March 18 . Book tickets here .

How the SNP went from political prosperity to scandal-ridden chaos

by www.telegraph.co.uk Leave a Comment

For more than a decade, it has been one of the most effective political machines in Western democracy. Just five weeks ago, Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell, the SNP chief executive, were named as Britain’s second most influential power couple.

Now, the pair, and some believe their party and movement, are hurtling into political oblivion.

Scotland’s longest-serving First Minister will depart office within days. Her husband was forced out on Saturday , after taking the blame for misleading the Scottish public over how many people will vote to succeed his wife.

Meanwhile, a party once feted for its iron discipline has spectacularly unravelled. Its first leadership contest in two decades has been hit by scandal and fearsome infighting , while court action could yet derail it further.

With the spectre of a police probe hanging over the party, Liz Lloyd, Ms Sturgeon’s most trusted aide, John Swinney, her deputy first minister and Murray Foote, a senior party spin doctor, have followed Ms Sturgeon’s lead by quitting.

Now, with poll ratings plummeting, experts believe there may be no immediate way back for a party that was seen as posing a very real threat to the existence of the United Kingdom.

James Mitchell, professor of public policy at Edinburgh University and an expert on the SNP, compared the turmoil to “a pressure cooker effect that has just blown”.

“There have been a whole lot of internal disagreements in the SNP for quite some time,” he said.

“Sturgeon’s departure has brought to the surface the problems. It is unravelling very fast and you can’t put a block on it. Using the pressure cooker analogy, you cannot put the lid back on it. There was no release valve. It has just exploded.”

The SNP still plans to choose a new leader next Monday, with Sturgeon “continuity candidate” Humza Yousaf facing Kate Forbes and Ash Regan in what has been an extraordinarily divisive contest.

Blair McDougall, a senior figure in the No campaign during the 2014 referendum, claimed Ms Sturgeon had “run out of road”. Her departure had left her party “shocked and bereft”, without the figurehead that had kept its politically disparate factions united, he said.

He claimed the SNP had “cultivated a conspiracy” that suggested Scotland had been deprived of natural resources and made poorer by Westminster, which had not been true.

“When you have a secretive tightly controlled party machine whose view of the world is one great conspiracy you can’t be surprised it unravels,” he said.

Robert Pyper, emeritus professor of government and public policy at the University of the West of Scotland, said the SNP’s “penchant for secrecy and concealment has exacerbated the internal divisions”.

“The sudden departure of Nicola Sturgeon has blown the lid,” he added. “The SNP’s failures are now being exposed month by month.

“I don’t think you can ever say Scottish independence is dead. But the SNP have been utterly obsessed by the independence project to the exclusion of delivering on public policies and that has fundamentally damaged the independence project.”

The husband

Mr Murrell has been at the top of Scottish nationalist politics for a quarter of a century. He had largely managed to stay out of the limelight, even after he married Ms Sturgeon in 2010, but over recent years he has become embroiled in a series of scandals.

There were concerns when Ms Sturgeon succeeded Alex Salmond as party leader in 2014 that the arrangement was inappropriate, with Mr Murrell having been the party chief executive since 1999. Privately, senior SNP figures urged Mr Murrell to stand down. But Ms Sturgeon brushed aside their fears that too much power would be concentrated in one household.

Those who raised concerns at the time say they have been vindicated, with the “Sturrells” running the country and ruling party as heads of a tiny clique of select politicians and advisers.

Even SNP Cabinet ministers complained that they had little influence over policy-making in their own portfolio areas.

The party, Prof Mitchell said, had been run by a “tiny number of people – as few as five at the very core and that includes her [Sturgeon’s] husband”.

The party establishment under Mr Murrell had barely disguised its preference that Mr Yousaf, who until the turmoil of recent days had embraced his status as the “continuity candidate”, succeed Ms Sturgeon.

Ms Lloyd, Ms Sturgeon’s closest aide and a taxpayer-funded special adviser, announced that she would stand down last week, hours after Ms Regan had complained that her assistance to Mr Yousaf’s campaign was inappropriate.

Mr Swinney, the deputy first minister and another member of the inner circle, is following Ms Sturgeon to Holyrood’s backbenches but has endorsed Mr Yousaf and attacked Ms Forbes, his main rival.

A numbers game

The scandal that saw the SNP descend into complete turmoil erupted after journalists and leadership contenders exposed a cover-up at party headquarters over its membership numbers.

The SNP’s large membership had been a source of pride for the party and Mr Murrell in particular. He became known for tweeting regular updates about the number of new recruits as the SNP enjoyed its huge influx after the 2014 referendum.

The party has become more reticent about releasing the figure over recent years, amid claims large numbers had quit over gender reforms, a lack of progress on independence or to join Mr Salmond’s Alba Party.

When the Sunday Mail, a Scottish tabloid, published a story on February 12 claiming as many as 30,000 members had recently quit, it brought a furious denial from the party.

Mr Foote, the party’s head of communications at Holyrood, called the 30,000 claim “b——s” and “wrong by about 30,000”.

When Ms Sturgeon announced she was standing down days later, journalists asked the SNP how many members were eligible to vote in the leadership contest.

The party repeatedly briefed that numbers were similar to the previously published figure, which was 103,884.

It was only after leadership candidates Ms Forbes and Ms Regan publicly demanded that the size of the electorate be released that the party reluctantly admitted on Thursday that the true total stands at just 72,186.

Mr Foote, a former newspaper editor, resigned the following day , claiming he had been misled into wrongly denying the media reports.

After the loss of Mr Foote, who was well-liked within the SNP, support drained away from Mr Murrell, even among Sturgeon loyalists.

He quit on Saturday, and accepted responsibility for the fiasco, after he was told he would face a vote of no confidence by the party’s ruling committee if he did not.

Police

The SNP has become embroiled in a long-running police investigation over party finances, which some party insiders believe will soon yield dramatic results.

When Ms Sturgeon began her first attempt to rerun the 2014 independence referendum, Mr Murrell launched an appeal to raise a £1 million campaign war chest from supporters.

However, the online fundraiser was quietly dropped after the 2017 snap general election, called by Theresa May, took the SNP by surprise.

The party lost more than a third of its seats after the referendum plan proved unpopular with voters.

The SNP claimed the £482,000 the fundraiser had brought in, together with money from a second fundraiser held in 2019 taking the total to £600,000, would only be spent on a future referendum campaign.

However, in 2020, a nationalist blog Wings Over Scotland drew attention to the SNP’s 2019 accounts, according to which it had just £96,854 in “cash in hand and at bank”.

Members questioned where their cash had gone and a handful called in the police.

A succession of unconvincing explanations from SNP headquarters followed, including that the cash had been “woven through” the accounts.

Intrigue deepened when members elected a new treasurer in November 2020, the MP Douglas Chapman, in a landslide after he vowed to increase financial transparency.

He resigned the following May, claiming he had “not received the support or financial information to carry out the fiduciary duties of national treasurer”.

Joanna Cherry, an MP and leading Sturgeon critic, had been elected to the party’s ruling National Executive in the same set of internal elections. She stood down shortly after Mr Chapman, saying she had been unable to fulfil her mandate “to improve transparency and scrutiny” and “uphold the party’s constitution”.

Prof Mitchell said: “It is bizarre – the very fact there is a police inquiry is a huge challenge. They are clearly struggling for money. The business community has abandoned the SNP under Sturgeon and while they claimed mass membership replaced business donations, we now know they don’t have that.”

It also emerged that Mr Murrell had personally lent the party £107,620 interest free, a highly unusual arrangement not initially declared to the Electoral Commission as it should have been.

The police investigation into finances had continued, with a report that “outlines enquiries already undertaken and seeks further instruction” recently sent to Scotland’s prosecution service.

There has been chatter for weeks in Scottish political circles that major developments are imminent.

Succession

Even supporters of Ms Sturgeon admit that her failure to groom an obvious successor was a major failing which has contributed to the current chaos.

She was crowned party leader unopposed in 2014, when Mr Salmond quit after losing the referendum.

It initially appeared that Derek Mackay, who was finance secretary, had been earmarked by Ms Sturgeon to one day take on the top job.

However, his political career ended in disgrace in February 2020, hours before he was due to set out the Scottish budget, after it emerged that he had sent “creepy” online messages to a 16-year-old schoolboy.

Although Mr Mackay was cleared of any criminality he never returned to Holyrood as an MSP.

Ms Sturgeon’s leadership style meant that it was almost impossible for her ministers to carve out their own political identity or set policy, her critics claim, leaving all of the potential contenders underprepared.

“The people now standing to replace her have made no decisions of their own,” Mr McDougall said.

“The only other person allowed to make any decision in Nicola Sturgeon’s government was John Swinney. Everybody else had to run it through her. So when you have the collapse of such a centralised party and government you leave behind a party that is shocked and bereft.

“Kate Forbes has been fed lines throughout her career so when you suddenly have to take a line on your religious view, you have no idea how to do it.”

Alex Salmond

Once seen as the closest of allies, Ms Sturgeon’s relationship with her former mentor broke down spectacularly in 2018, over allegations of sexual misconduct when he was first minister.

He took the Government he once led to court – and won – over claims that it had botched its internal investigation against him. Mr Salmond had wanted Ms Sturgeon to step in to argue for a confidential mediation process but she refused, leaving him feeling betrayed.

Worse was to follow when Mr Salmond was changed with 14 offences, including two of attempted rape. He was cleared of all charges, but a Holyrood inquiry into the Scottish Government’s handling of the episode saw their dispute erupt into an extraordinary all-out war.

Mr Salmond accused figures close to Ms Sturgeon, including Mr Murrell, of effectively conspiring against him to have him jailed.

While she was found by the majority of members of a Holyrood committee to have misled parliament, she was cleared of breaking the ministerial code in a separate probe, allowing her to survive the scandal.

Mr Salmond then attempted to mount a political comeback, launching the rival Alba Party ahead of the 2021 Holyrood elections. While the venture has so far largely been a failure, Mr Salmond retains a sharp political mind and remains intent on revenge.

He has contacts and influence within sections of the independence movement and Kirk Torrance, one of his close allies, is advising Ms Regan’s campaign.

Gender

Ms Sturgeon has denied that an outcry over her gender laws, passed at Holyrood in December and blocked by the UK Government in January, played a part in her departure.

However, the spectacle of her refusing to say whether transgender rapist Isla Bryson , initially sent to a women’s jail under a prisons policy that followed the same principle as her self-ID law, was a man or a woman, risked turning Ms Sturgeon into a figure of ridicule.

Critics said the policy was an individual example of Ms Sturgeon’s wider failings, as she dismissed women’s concerns as “not valid” and failed to engage with the substance of her policy, instead seeing it as a means of boosting her “progressive” credentials.

Even when it became clear that the plans were toxic with the Scottish public, Ms Sturgeon pushed ahead, fearful that backtracking would blow up her flagship coalition deal with the far-Left Scottish Greens.

She also made a potent enemy out of Scotland’s other most powerful woman, the author JK Rowling, who launched a series of extraordinary attacks on a First Minister she branded a “destroyer of women’s rights”.

Some SNP figures looked on horrified as the policy cost the party and the independence cause loyal supporters, with the issue having the rare ability in Scotland to unify campaigners from both sides of the constitutional divide.

It also caused the biggest parliamentary rebellion in the SNP’s history, damaging Ms Sturgeon’s authority as nine SNP MSPs openly defied her.

SNP politicians had been told that if they voted for the legislation, the issue would then fade from prominence. The theory was exploded by the UK Government veto and the Bryson case, and leaves a major headache for Ms Sturgeon’s successor.

“If you don’t listen to constructive criticism you end up in a whole heap of a mess,” Prof Mitchell said. “They didn’t consult, they didn’t listen. Gender recognition is an example of that going wrong.”

Independence

On an issue that any SNP leader is ultimately judged on, Ms Sturgeon failed to deliver, despite a favourable set of political circumstances.

Disputes over possible strategies for leaving the UK, after a referendum repeatedly promised was never delivered, fuelled divisions within the SNP and the wider movement.

Ms Sturgeon promised her activists a referendum three times. A Supreme Court challenge last year, which led to confirmation that UK Government permission was needed for a vote, was seen by some as a major blunder.

Her “plan C” – attempting to turn the general election into a “de-facto referendum” – horrified many SNP MPs and faced being rejected in what promised to be a messy special party conference.

Ms Sturgeon had organised the event in the hope that her party would rubber stamp her plan, but it will now never go ahead with even “continuity candidate” Mr Yousaf disowning her strategy.

Meanwhile, opinion polls show that despite Brexit, which Scots widely rejected, and the chaotic tenure of Boris Johnson who was despised north of the border, support for independence has barely shifted since 2014.

“Nicola Sturgeon’s great talent was as a communicator,” Prof Mitchell said. “There is no one quite like her in the UK. But it only takes you so far and it covered up significant weaknesses.

“The polls haven’t moved over the last eight years even though circumstances – like Boris Johnson – were as good as they would ever be.”