Sturgeon: This week has been the worst of my life

Nicola Sturgeon says she is enduring the “worst week of my life” after Peter Murrell, her estranged husband, admitted stealing more than £400,000 from the SNP.

The former first minister of Scotland, speaking for the first time publicly since Murrell pleaded guilty to embezzlement, said she was realising she did not know him “at all” despite being married to him for years.

She told an audience at a book festival in Ireland on Thursday that she did not question the array of luxury items Murrell bought using stolen money.

Ms Sturgeon said she was “aware” of some of the hundreds of items boughtusing embezzled money. But they were a high-earning couple with no children, and she assumed he could afford to buy them with his SNP chief executive’s salary.

She spoke out as questions continued to be raised about her claim that she knew nothing about the embezzlement, which totalled £400,310.65 between August 2010, a month after the couple married, and October 2022.

Murrell was the SNP’s chief executive for more than two decades, spanning Ms Sturgeon’s time as deputy party leader, and leader and first minister. They shared a home in Uddingston near Glasgow.

On Monday, Murrell admitted embezzling funds to buy two cars, including a Jaguar, and filing false business expense claims worth more than £18,000. He was remanded in custody and will be sentenced next month. The SNP is facing a Westminster inquiry into his crimes.

‘It’s a really painful truth to process’

Ms Sturgeon said at Listowel Writers’ Week in County Kerry: “This has been probably the worst week of my life and you know the last few years have had some tough ones for me, but this one, I think, surpasses all of them.

“You’re coming to terms with the fact that you spent many years – I spent many years – married to somebody that, as it turns out, I obviously didn’t know at all.

“It’s a really painful truth to process, and I think I’m only in the very early stages of processing it. And then to be in a position of such public turmoil myself makes that even harder.”

Ms Sturgeon has been photographed with the Jaguar, and wearing a £425 necklace from a jeweller in Shetland that appeared on the list of embezzled items. She has said she first knew of the car when Operation Branchform, the police investigation into the SNP’s finances, targeted it in early 2023.

Ms Sturgeon was arrested in June 2023 and released pending further investigation. Police Scotland last year confirmed its inquiry into her had ended without any charges.

She told the book festival she had been “completely exonerated” and “totally cleared” after a “lengthy” and “very forensic” police investigation. She said she understood people would be asking: “How could she not have known?”

She said: “I think underlying that question there is a big misassumption, which is that I knew anything about it, or that I knew all about it.

“You know, I think everybody assumes that all of this stuff that it turns out now my former husband was buying, I knew about it, and I just didn’t question who paid for it.

“As recently as Monday, I was reading about things in the newspapers for the first time that I’ve never seen, I didn’t know about it. It wasn’t just that I didn’t question where it came from. I’ve never seen it.”

‘We were two people on high salaries’

Ms Sturgeon added: “We were two people on high salaries, no kids, and this is another factor, I was doing a job that had me working round the clock, away from home a lot of the time. Maybe this doesn’t reflect well on me, I didn’t spend a lot of the time in my kitchen.

“But I never questioned that some of these things he was buying I was aware of that he couldn’t have afforded them. He could have afforded it. Just as other people have been, I have been deceived. 

“I have been misled, I have been lied to and I have been betrayed, and I won’t be the last woman who has been betrayed by her husband.”

[Source: Daily Telegraph]