Scotland's former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said Sunday she feels as though she is "serving a sentence for a crime I did not commit" after her estranged husband admitted stealing hundreds of thousands of pounds from the party she once led.
Peter Murrell last week pleaded guilty to embezzling more than 400,000 pounds, equivalent to roughly $540,000, from the Scottish National Party during the period he served as its chief executive. The money funded a lavish lifestyle that included a motorhome, two cars, jewelry, and handbags. Murrell committed the crimes between 2010 and 2022, according to BBC News.
In an interview with BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg that aired Sunday, Sturgeon struggled to hold back tears as she recalled gifts from Murrell that turned out to have been bought with stolen SNP funds. She has consistently denied any knowledge of her husband's wrongdoing and was cleared by police after being arrested in June 2023.
"I am not responsible for the crimes that my former husband committed and I'm not going to apologise for somebody else's crimes," Sturgeon told the BBC.
She repeated that position when pressed on whether she bore no responsibility at all despite her role as party leader during much of the period the thefts took place. "No... [Murrell] perpetrated a crime on the SNP. By definition, that included me as the party leader. He misled. He deceived. He is serving and will be serving a sentence for a crime he committed. I'm out here feeling as if I'm serving a sentence for a crime I did not commit," she said.
Sturgeon acknowledged that allowing Murrell to remain SNP chief executive after she became party leader in 2014 was a mistake. "Of course, with hindsight, I wish that I could go back and take a different decision," she told ABC News in remarks reported by the outlet.
The largest single transaction Murrell made with stolen funds was 124,550 pounds spent on a motorhome that was parked at his mother's house. Sturgeon said she had no conscious memory of ever seeing the vehicle. She said it was parked between the house and a neighbor's property and not immediately visible, adding that if she had seen it she would probably have assumed it belonged to a neighbor.
Sturgeon also invoked a broader argument about how women are treated when the men in their lives commit crimes. "For my own sake, but for the sake of people out there, a lot of women who end up finding themselves blamed for the actions of the men in their lives, I'm not going to contribute to that kind of sense that I am responsible for somebody else's crimes," she said.
The reaction to the interview was mixed. UK government minister Pat McFadden warned there should not be a "culture of control and secrecy that just tries to shut this down." Murrell's plea caps a five-year police investigation of the SNP, a party that has governed Scotland's semiautonomous government for nearly two decades while campaigning for Scottish independence from the United Kingdom.
Turmoil within the party became public in 2023, as questions circulated about its finances and falling membership numbers. Sturgeon resigned as first minister in February of that year. Murrell left his position as chief executive the following month after taking responsibility for misleading the media about the membership collapse. Police arrested him at the couple's Glasgow home in April 2023.
