Thread by @PeatWorrier

Lots of things can be true at once. Here's my best reckoning with the absurdity of the Murrell admissions this week. Firstly - he deserves for the book to be thrown at him for his sustained, cynical & indefensible breach of trust over a long period. White collar crime is serious.

I think we'd benefit from a guideline from the Sentencing Council on fraud - but I would expect, even with a guilty plea, a prison term of 3 years reflecting the sustained abuse of trust, adjacency to public office - unknown quantities being how much is potentially recoverable.

Murrell's list of purchases are ridiculous and are rightly being mocked. The household stuff speaks of an utterly banal kleptomania and desire to own things which look cheap but apparently cost wild sums of cash (sorry Lalique but those pepper gringers are powerfully naff)

The idea you can buy a £120,000 mobile home without anything problematic will happen speaks to what I think of a thanataphoric urge in some politicians - we've seen a few examples recently - who are literally willing their own political deaths through demented risk-taking.

The psychological suspicion is that they want to get caught. The massive stakes - which will be visited on Murrell - indicate how twisted all this gets. Ask anyone who has ever known a fraud of an embezzler, and they may recognise this corkscrew story of a corkscrew personality.

I'm curious about frauds like this - if only to understand the psychological dimensions. A sense of entitlement seems a major factor, combined with ambiguity about authority and functions to get it started - with Murrell, there seems to have been a substantial escalation.

Final thought: if any of you are unlucky enough to find yourself interviewed by the police under caution and have the opportunity to take advice - you're going to be told to exercise your privilege against self-incrimination by your lawyer. I'd recommend you follow their steer.

I appreciate it is all very interesting to pretend this is a strange thing for a person to do - but the right to silence is a basic ECHR right and the evidence suggests the justice system would have fewer wrongful convictions to contend with if more people exercised it.