Nicola Sturgeon and her husband Peter Murrell were at one time Scotland’s premier power couple. Sturgeon became the leader of the Scottish National Party and the First Minister in 2014. Peter Murrell served as the chief executive officer of the SNP from 2001 until 2023. But all that came crumbling down. She surprisingly resigned in 2023, claiming ‘occupational burnout’, while he also resigned his position after being criticized for misleading the party.
But things got worse. Murrell was charged with embezzlement in 2024 for using SNP money to purchase various luxury items and last week admitted to stealing over £400,000 from party over a 12-year period and now faces a lengthy prison sentence.
[T]he lengthy indictment, which included a 119-page list of all the items he bought using the SNP’s money, disclosed that for much of that time he was pilfering the SNP’s accounts to acquire a remarkable series of luxury goods, while earning £107,000 as party chief executive.
The indictment noted that in addition to the £124,000 motorhome, which he left parked in his mother’s driveway in Fife, and the Jaguar I-Pace, he bought gardening equipment for the home he shared with Sturgeon, a £1,300 Miele coffee machine for their home, a telescope, a Sony PlayStation, Fortnum & Mason hampers and several Montblanc fountain pens.
The charge said he submitted false invoices, used the party’s credit cards, falsified the party’s accounts and in some cases claimed they were legitimate expenses to cover up his embezzlement. Several times he used credit cards taken out in the names of SNP staff who worked for him.
…Murrell was arrested at the home he then shared with Sturgeon on 5 April 2023, and the motorhome seized outside his mother’s home in Fife, while detectives also raided the SNP’s headquarters close to the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh.
One question is whether Sturgeon knew about any of this. She stoutly denies it, claiming that he did all this in secret.
Under pressure from the SNP’s political opponents, Sturgeon issued a statement on Instagram again denying she had any knowledge or suspicion of her former husband’s thefts. “I am utterly appalled that he did so and cannot begin to understand why,” she said. “These are not my crimes. I was misled just as others were.
“To be deceived and let down by a husband I loved and trusted has caused me acute pain. Why he acted as he did is, and always will be, beyond my comprehension.”
…[Current SNP leader John] Swinney sidestepped questions about why Sturgeon had appeared unconcerned about the luxury goods Murrell was bringing home or whether the officials who were castigated for initially raising the alarm about party accounts were owed an apology.
…In a statement issued through her lawyer, Sturgeon said she had no idea Murrell had bought a camper van until the police investigation, and did not know of the luxury watches or games consoles.
“In respect of any items I was aware of Peter having purchased, I had no reason to doubt that he had used his own money,” she said.
“We were both earning high salaries and, due to the responsibilities of my job, rarely socialised or went on holidays. We had separate bank accounts and I had no access to his financial records.”
…Sturgeon was also arrested as a suspect in June 2023, four months after unexpectedly quitting as party leader, but was later cleared of wrongdoing. The couple separated after Murrell’s arrest and announced their divorce last year.
While Sturgeon has been cleared of wrongdoing concerning the embezzlement, the question still lingers whether she knew about his activities and if not, how she could be so oblivious about her husband’s extravagant purchases. Her claim to innocence is that it was because they both earned high salaries and had independent bank accounts. I find that hard to accept. In a marriage, it is hard to imagine one spouse not asking questions about where the money is coming from when the partner buys a lot of luxury items, like cars and a luxury motor home, which are not trifles. After all, the fact that he had to embezzle funds to purchase them shows that the couple did not have that kind of money lying around. While Burrell claims he parked the RV at his mother’s home, was his mother told not to tell his wife about it? Did they never visit his mother? Also, an RV is not a lawn ornament. Presumably he took it on trips. Did he do so without Sturgeon? If so, was she not curious about where and how he went?
The couple separated, but only after after Murrell’s arrest, and divorced later. But one wonders if this was to create distance between the two so that her claim that he acted in secret was more plausible and she was less likely to be charged as an accomplice
This is yet another example of how people who are not very wealthy themselves but whose lives intersect with those who are can fall prey to envy of the luxury lifestyle and aspire to it, even if they cannot afford it. And from there, if the feeling of envy is strong enough, it is but a short step to doing things that enable them to at least partly enjoy that lifestyle, even if the means chosen are illegal.
I’m from Scotland so I’ve been watching this unfold for a while. I think that it’s probable that Nichola didn’t know, she just doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who would lie about it. And if she did know I doubt that her reaction after he was caught would be the same. That said I don’t know her.
As to hiding things from your partner, I think you may be a little naïve, that kind of thing goes on all the time, And you must remember that she was first minister of Scotland, so she was pretty busy.
Yeah, people deceive their spouses about all sorts of things all the time, up to and including having whole other families. If he was able to deceive everybody whose actual job it was to monitor the party finances, I don’t see why it’s hard to believe he could deceive his wife as well.
Even if she did know of some or most of the purchases, she may not have been aware of their value and assumed he could afford them. After all, this went on over 12 years, so he was “only” skimming about £30,000 a year while legitimately pulling down over £100,000 a year. If she knew about the RV, she could’ve assumed he was making payments and/or that it cost much less. (“It’s a banana. How much could it cost -- $10?”) Whether she approved of his extravagances is a different question, but people are very willing to not see what they don’t want to see, as we’ve had ample demonstration of over the last couple years.
Compared with the kind of embezzlement that goes on in the USA, the things Ms Sturgeon’s husband has illegally acquired seem fairly modest. (Not that it condones any of it.)
Mano, sometimes I think you are still not cynical enough for politics.
You neglect the possibility that he had the money but chose to embezzle anyway. Because: free stuff.
Very much this! Aside from the RV (and the games consoles, which are so relatively cheap that I don’t understand why anybody mentions them) all of the items I’ve seen mentioned -- watches, fountain pens, a coffee machine -- are things where it’s perfectly possible to spend an eye-watering sum of money without it being at all obvious. A top-end coffee machine doesn’t really look all that different to one that costs a tenth of the price. A top-end watch or fountain pen doesn’t necessarily look all that different to one that costs a hundreth of the price. You can walk around wearing a watch that most people will not notice at all, or if they do, they’ll just think “oh, that’s quite a nice watch”, and only another watch enthusiast will recognise as being worth enough to buy a house.
Nicola Sturgeon was targeted by the anti-trans hate movement that is extremely powerful and prevalent in the UK right now. Hate mongers like Harry Potter billionaire J K Rowling demonised her for not hating transgender people:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-63170808
This very likely was part of her “occupational burnout”. Transphobes are notoriously obsessive and vindictive.
(off topic)
If Mano allows, I would like to mention that a former FtB blogger -- an atheist and feminist who was part of FtB from its inception, and who is transgender, has recently been the victim of a horrific transphobic bashing of the sort that is inspired by the so-called “gender critical” hate movement. They have needed surgery and are living in an AirBnB because it’s still too traumatic for them to return to their apartment which is covered in blood.
I would like to ask anyone who remembers the Blag Hag blog fondly (https://proxy.freethought.online/blaghag/) to please consider contributing to their hospital bills.
https://bsky.app/profile/jeymccreight.bsky.social/post/3mmezawj4ws2i
And to be aware this is where the ideology of Rowling and her ilk inevitably leads.
(/off topic)
This is what the press loves to do, particularly when a woman is involved. “How could she not know?” etc.
Now, Murrel has pleaded guilty to the charges brought a year ago after being arrested over two years ago from a criminal investigation which started five years ago. It was inevitable, and a shame his legal team didn’t manage to persuade him sooner.
But, yes, how could she not know? And in the effort to sling anything at the SNP, the journalists’ questions fixate on the new party leader: “why, Mr Swinney, did Sturgeon appear unconcerned about something that she didn’t know about but her partner did?”
/s Woman’s intuition and all that: she must have known something!
Many good points here. What we must remember is that Nichola is a much hated woman. Both for independence and her pro trans stance, So the likes of JK Rowling (who seemed fairly normal when I knew her http://bythecanal.net/chapters/schools.htm#clubs) and, alas, much of Scotland wish her all the ills. Even John Crace in the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/may/29/digested-week-donald-trump-ending-iran-war-he-started, who should know better doubts her veracity.
I’ll again point out she was first minister, she lived in Bute house. I doubt that he stored all his nintendos there.
I remain agnostic about whether she knew or not.
The party’s treasurer resigned at one point, complaining that he had not been given access to the information needed to do his job, and there are reports that Sturgeon had an authoritarian style of dealing with government and party colleagues, and refused to listen to any concerns raised (although at least one of these reports comes from the vile transphobe and ex-MSP and MP for the SNP, Joanna Cherry). But the original wrong was for Murrell to remain party chief executive when Sturgeon became party leader (and first minister), practically turning the party into a family business.
The SNP was very lucky the case did not come before the court just before rather than just after the recent elections for Holyrood (the Scottish Parliament) -- assuming it was indeed nothing more than luck. They lost quite a lot of support anyway, but retained most of their seats due to the 4-way split among the anti-independence parties (Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, Reform). They ended up 7 seats short of a majority, but there is still a pro-independence majority at Holyrood due to a stellar performance by my own party, the Scottish Greens, up from 7 to a record 15 seats (I talked to Lorna Slater, our former co-leader, shortly before the vote, and the most she hoped for was 13).
Considering the sexual assault and harassment scandal over her predecessor, one-time mentor and later bitter enemy Alex Salmond (not convicted at trial on charges up to and including rape, but the behaviour he admitted to should have seen him drummed out of public life), and Sturgeon’s own damaged reputation, one cannot avoid concluding that there’s something fishy about the SNP!