Georgia Edkins

The SNP ‘£100,000 motorhome’ scoop, complete with an exclusive picture of the offending motorhome being removed by police from outside the house of former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s mother-in-law, revealed to a concerned public the extent and seriousness of the police investigation into £600,000 of ‘missing’ party funds raised for the second Scottish independence referendum. Shortly afterwards, Sturgeon and her husband Peter Murrell were arrested and questioned by the police.

The scoop, which came to symbolise the wider malaise of the SNP, began as a rumour in political circles, but it was political editor Georgia Edkins’ intuition, nose for a story, dogged determination and good old-fashioned door-knocking, that proved its veracity. 

Edkins also broke the story that by last year the SNP had lost some 50,000 of the 125,000 members it had in 2019 – something the party had tried to keep quiet – and in another exclusive revealed a business donor, related to an MP, was giving the party ‘cash in envelopes’ that wasn’t being declared.

Judges praised Edkins’s “exemplary pavement-pounding dedication to getting her great SNP motorhome scoop,” along with her ability, more generally, “to make Scottish politics easily relatable and dramatic even to non-Scots” and to readers “outside the political bubble.”