The Sunday Ishmael: 31/05/2026

She appears to have doubled her body weight since escaping Scotland and taking up residence in a luxury apartment in London; as demonstrated by the BBC's cruel choice of  past images of her prancing like a tit on triumphalist platforms in her neat little suits and her neat little mouth.

The neat little mouth is more of a clenched thin line these days, but now she has to go in for the big, blowsy male-cut jackets and trousers to drape her rendition of a rather large dominatrix in vertiginous heels. She ticked the boxes in her carefully-managed, sad presentation on the Laura Kuenssberg Show today: 

• Look, I'm a working class girl from Glasgow
• I'm a loyal and trusting wife whose husband deceived her 
• We never had holidays because I worked so hard as First Minister for Scotland
• We never socialised for ditto reason 
• We don't have children(sob in voice, pause, tears filling eyes, leaving the audience to remember the Miscarriage) 
• I believed the Accountants and Auditors, so its all their fault. 
• No, I haven't formed a new relationship.

It was only when Laura suggested that Nicola may be facing the sequestration of the suburban marital home to recover the £400,000 her husband spaffed on  fancy watches and gold inlaid pepper grinders, not to mention the electric Jaguar and the fancy motor home that we saw a return of the feisty Sturgeon.

 It is ma hame and Ah havenae committed any offences. I was exonerated and fully co-operated with the Polis. The Nae Comment interview Ah gave was on legal advice and didnae mean I was not co-operating. It was all on Peter and he has pleaded guilty and that is that. I liked that necklace and Peter gave it to me as a surprise present when I admired it in that Shetland shop. D'ye think I would hae worn it or used the £5000 pen if I'd known Peter had bought it wi' embezzled funds?

 Did you visit your mother-in-law at all?

 A handfu' o' times.

 Didn't you happen to notice a sodding great luxury motor home parked in the front drive?

 It was parked round the side and I thought it was the neighbour's. And Peter said that because of Covid it would be good to have a motorhame to go campaigning in. Keep us out of hotels, like.

 But you surely noticed a top of the range new Jaguar parked on your own front drive?

 I wasn't a driver and I'm nae interested in cars so I didnae notice it. And Peter said we needed to hae an electric car and this one had a good range. 

 

It really was as bad as that. Nicola Sturgeon's very own Prince Andrew makes an embarrassing tit of himself with Emily Maitlis moment.

The magnificent Joanna Cherry (okay, a nationalist, but nobody's perfect), saw straight through the theatrics, tears and attempts at self-exoneration. Sturgeon's either corrupt or incompetent, she said. If she wasn't complicit in the corruption at the top of the SNP, then she utterly failed to provide oversight, scrutiny and due diligence. Cherry is calling for an Inquiry into what went wrong. John Swinney, First Minister, has refused to have an Inquiry. He says he knows what went wrong. Peter Murrell. Murrell's a self-confessed criminal and there's no need to bother about an Inquiry. Cherry says Swinney's sole purpose as First Minister is to cover-up the mess of the Sturgeon years. Don't forget that John Swinney (former Finance Secretary, former SNP Leader), Colin Beattie (SNP Treasurer), Peter Murrell (former SNP Chief Executive) and Nicola Sturgeon (former First Minister and Leader of the SNP) were best buddies, SNP aristocracy, a powerful little Gang of Four, who hounded Salmond into Court to face charges of which he was exonerated, but which successfully ended his political career. 

Joanna Cherry is reminding us that although Murrell is a useful scapegoat, the question of the missing £600,000 remains unanswered. What happened to it? 

Sturgeon's answer to that is that the SNP party finances went up and down a lot.

Then there's the neat little fact that Murrell's court appearance was "continued" until after the Holyrood elections were held, presumably so that the facts would not be known by voters in case it prejudiced them against the SNP, which, I remind you, has just achieved its fifth consecutive term of office. Swinney is busy pretending that his bare majority, achieved by the votes of a very small turn out, and therefore cannot be seen as the "will of the Scottish people", has been given a mandate to request Westminster for permission to hold another referendum. Well, it will distract the voters from Embezzlement, Incompetence, the Missing £600 grand and the Motorhome. When Westminster refuses, as we can only hope they will hold firm, then the Nats can distract themselves by vilifying the English. 

As usual.

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The 5th June 2026 will be the one hundred and tenth anniversary of the death of Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener, at the age of 66. He went down with his ship, the HMS Hampshire, off the coast of Birsay in Orkney, together with 737 of the 749 people aboard.

HMS Hampshire

When I started work in Orkney, I had the privilege of sharing an office with a chap who regaled me with many tales of my newly-adopted homeland. Back then, I didn't know my Royal Oak from my Hampshire and was enthralled by my colleague's tale. In June, 2016, midway through the First World War, HMS Hampshire sailed out  from Scapa Flow on a secret mission to our ally Russia, via the port of Arkhangelsk, loaded with gold for the Russians, carrying national hero Lord Kitchener to do the deal. Kitchener had travelled up  from London by train, before embarking on the Hampshire. Due to the gale-force conditions, Hampshire's route would take it through the Pentland Firth, then turn north along the western coast of the Orkney Islands, accompanied by escorting destroyers,  Unity and Victor. The destroyers  fell behind Hampshire due to the weather conditions and were ordered to return to Scapa Flow.

Alone in heavy seas, Hampshire was approximately 1.5 nautical miles off Mainland in the Orkney Islands between the Brough of Birsay and Marwick Head at 19:40 on 5 June when a devastating explosion occurred, holing the cruiser between bows and bridge, and the lifeboats were smashed against the side of the ship by the heavy seas when they were lowered. About 15 minutes after the explosion, Hampshire sank by the bow. Of the 735 crewmembers and 14 passengers aboard, only 12 crew survived after coming ashore on three Carley floats. A total of 737 were lost, including Kitchener and all the members of the mission to Russia.

It would still be daylight until 11.00 pm at that time of year, and onshore observers from the Royal Garrison Artillery had seen the Hampshire explode. 

Palace village, Birsay

  The postmistress in the remote settlement of Birsay sent an immediate SOS by telegraph to Kirkwall to alert the naval authorities. But the Hampshire went down quickly – time only to launch three small life rafts, which were soon hopelessly overcrowded with desperate sailors. Interviews in the local archives hold the recollections of some of the Orcadians who braved the howling winds and torrential rain to try to rescue those sailors who might make it to the few inlets between the cliffs. They found the life rafts dashed on the rocks, one thrust by the enormous waves into a crevice in the cliffs high above the sea. The official report lists 643 dead, though local historian Brian Budge believes the true figure to be 725. It is certain that there were a mere 12 survivors. Of Lord Kitchener there was no sign at all. Though corpses continued to wash up on Orkney's shores  for weeks afterwards, Kitchener’s body was never found.

Crofters and fishermen ran down to the cliffs with ropes, lanterns, blankets — anything they could grab. But the cliffs at Marwick are sheer, and the sea was smashing against them with such force that no boat could be launched. Soldiers formed a line and barred the Orcadians from the cliffs, some with bayonets fixed. One man said he felt “as if we were watching men die and could do nothing.” Another said the cries of the survivors were carried on the wind but faded quickly.

Local people desperate to rescue the sailors reported their experience of being turned back at the point of a bayonet.  Orcadians believed that British military headquarters ordered the local lifeboat not to put to sea to attempt a rescue.

It was believed that the explosion had blown Hampshire's hull outwards, indicating sabotage. It was reported that two smaller explosions followed.

The wreck is designated as a controlled site under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986 at coordinates 59°7.065′N 3°23.843′W and diving is forbidden without a licence. The ship is upside down at a depth of 180–230 feet (30–38 fathoms; 55–70 m) of water.

 According to two men who dived the wreck before the current ban was introduced, she lies upside down on the seabed and you can swim straight into the cavernous engine rooms (“like Westminster Hall”, said one of them.) The ship’s coal-fired boilers hang from the roof above. The bow is severed from the rest of the ship – “It’s a huge hole, almost a third of the length of the ship,” said John Thornton, a Scapa Flow diver.  Veterans of shipwreck investigations say the first thing that sailors do when abandoning ship is to kick off their sea boots: the seabed at the scene of a disaster is generally littered with shoes or relics of shoes. There were none at the site of the Hampshire – evidence, says Thornton, that “the ship went down very fast indeed”.

My colleague told me that day trip outings for old people from the care homes would never go up to that spot because it brought back dreadfully distressing memories, particularly of being prevented from helping the survivors by soldiers. So distressed were local people that they raised the colossal sum of £700 to build a monument. A tower was erected on Marwick Head in 1926 by the people of Orkney to the memory of Kitchener and the officers and men of Hampshire. The Kitchener Memorial is a square, crenellated stone tower with the following inscription:

This tower was raised by the people of Orkney in memory of Field Marshal Earl Kitchener of Khartoum on that corner of his country which he had served so faithfully nearest to the place where he died on duty. He and his staff perished along with the officers and nearly all the men of HMS Hampshire on 5 June 1916.

Twenty  five years ago I walked up to the Kitchener Memorial on Marwick Head with my dog boys. I don't think I could do it now - it is a very steep climb.
The two files in the National Archives concerning the sinking of the Hampshire remained closed to the public until the end of 2015 and 2025. A  Freedom of Information enquiry after the files were opened revealed nothing to justify the sealing of the records for one hundred years. Had the compromising material been removed?

What was going on? Who wanted Kitchener dead? Where is the gold that Hampshire was carrying to seal negotiations with our Russian ally?  It was said that an expedition jointly sponsored by the arms dealer Sir Basil Zaharov and the German industrialist Gustav Krupp in the 1930s recovered good quantities of it. Was there a German spy on board who set bombs to sink the ship and was taken off the ship by submarine? Fritz Joubert Duquesne – a Boer and German spy – claimed to have assumed the identity of Russian Count Boris Zakrevsky and joined Kitchener in Scotland. Duquesne supposedly signalled a German U-boat shortly after departing Scapa Flow to alert them that Kitchener's ship was approaching. He was then rescued by the submarine as Hampshire sank. 

Was the hull blown out or blown in? Divers are not allowed to go down to check that out.  

 Oscar Wilde’s former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, published a pamphlet setting out his belief that Churchill had plotted Kitchener’s death, engineered the sinking of HMS Hampshire, and had done so for sinister wartime motives. He  alleged Churchill was responsible for “World War I misconduct,” sending the ship  to its doom in return for £40,000. Churchill sued Douglas, who served 6 months imprisonment.

The official story is that much of this is nonsense. Hampshire struck one of several mines laid by the German minelaying submarine U-75 on 28–29 May, just before the Battle of Jutland. 

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Marwick Head