Nicola Sturgeon’s ex and his £400,000 shopping spree

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0:09Today, Scotland's former First Minister, her ex-husband, and a£400 ,000 criminal shopping spree.

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1:01robotic lawnmower, luxury pens, and a lot of instant coffee all have in common. All are on a long and bizarre list of items bought with embezzled SNP political donations by Nicola Sturgeon's then-husband, Peter Murrell. The former chief executive of the SNP arrived quietly and early at court this morning, clutching an overnight bag. A clue, a guilty plea, was coming. How do you think, Mr Murrell? Any regrets? Last week, Murrell, who was the SNP's chief executive, pled guilty to stealing£400 ,000 from the party. This weekend, Sturgeon, who resigned as First Minister in 2023, finally broke her silence.

1:49But as the person who shared his life, as his wife, did you really not notice anything? I absolutely didn't know that he was committing crimes. In a BBC interview, she denied knowing anything about what her husband was doing. Are you angry with him? Am I angry with him? I don't even think that begins to cover it. She said she had been betrayed and deceived. He has put me into a position of real peril. He has subjected me to public vilification, having the finger of suspicion pointed at me, you know, humiliation. And is paying the price for a crime she didn't commit. She's had a very torrid and difficult week since the true extent of Peter Morrell's embezzlement became clear and also the extent to which the things that he's paid for by using stolen SNP money were embedded into their domestic life.

2:48Things that she carried, things that she wore, or things that she drank from, things that she or he will have made food with. It must be very painful for her.

3:02Sturgeon is not facing any charges related to his crimes. But with so many questions unanswered about her own role in the whole scandal, has she done enough to survive the political fallout and secure the future for the SNP? I think it's just an extraordinary drama. It's an epic Greek tragedy. From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus. Fast cars, novelty advent calendars, and that motorhome. Can Nicola Sturgeon's legacy survive this scandal?

3:39Severin Carell, you're The Guardian's Scotland editor, and you've been following Scottish politics for The Guardian for decades. Nicola Sturgeon has been at the heart of all of that. She had this stellar political career. But in the last few years, things have shifted dramatically since this huge embezzlement scandal. She just did this big interview with Laura Kunzberg at the weekend. I wanted to ask you, what did you make of that interview? In a way, it was actually classic Nicola Sturgeon. This is the Nicola Sturgeon that we've been used to watching. she had that combination of her legal training and decades of responding to very challenging situations by having a very clear control of a narrative but also I felt that there were times where she was clearly showing the toll that it had on her there were very clear moments where she was getting emotional both angry but also upset moments where she was clearly fighting tears This is a man that she had shared her life with for the best part of 20 years, who was revealed in the public eye in quite graphic way of being responsible for the most extraordinary degree of deceit and deception involving her.

4:51But also, you also got another sense that Nicola Sturgeon was adopting that persona which a lot of her critics find most difficult. There's a kind of poor me tendency in the way that she responds to a lot of questions. And at times you felt that she hadn't quite read the room. And why do you think she did the interview? I've heard people say it was kind of an attempt to rehabilitate her image, her political career. What's your take on that? The question about rehabilitating herself rather, I'm afraid, presupposes that she has actually done something wrong. And on the key question about what Murrell did, the crimes he committed, she has been cleared.

5:32But she will know that so many people believe that she has either been complicit or deliberately naive or was somehow implicated in what Murrell had done. And I think for her, it's about being determined to shape and control her own narrative. So this wasn't the behaviour of somebody hiding something. It was the behaviour of somebody who wanted to defend themselves vigorously and put themselves up for what would be, for most people, a pretty harrowing experience of being tested and probed for 55 minutes on camera. Yeah. How do you think that that would have landed with the members, SNP members who, you know, some of whom lost quite a lot of money?

6:14It struck me that Nicola Sturgeon was asked in that interview, you know, if she would compensate the members whose money was taken. She said it wasn't her responsibility. I think the first thing one has to remember is the extraordinary esteem that Nicola Sturgeon is held in by the vast majority of SNP members. It was while she was Deputy First Minister and the effective leader of the Scottish independence campaign, that the SNP's membership went up from the maybe 20 ,000, 25 ,000 people to as high as 130 ,000 under her leadership. So there will be a significant amount of loyalty to her. The point about whether members should be compensated, she will be resisting partly because it's an agenda which has been driven by her critics and enemies, not the party membership as a whole.

7:04What one has to remember is the Peter Murrell prosecution is ongoing. As part of that process, there will be a confiscation order where it's very likely that the prosecution will be asking the court to seize his assets and also the marital assets of Nicola Sturgeon herself, including the house that they shared outside Glasgow. So she isn't actually escaping from this unscathed, one assumes. What has the current First Minister John Swinney said since Murrell pleaded guilty. John Swinney says that he believes her 100%. Well, Nicola Sturgeon has made clear in her statement, I suspect you will have seen that today, that she was unaware of any of these issues.

7:45Can I ask if you believe that? I do believe that, yes. And that's not surprising. I mean, John Swinney and Nicola Sturgeon were and remain extremely close friends. Swinney was Nicola Sturgeon's closest political ally when she was First Minister. He was Deputy First Minister throughout her term and literally would stand at her side during some of the more torrid media interviews that she had to give. Swinney was asked by one journalist how he felt personally about the whole affair. John Swinney has known Peter Murrell since they were teenagers. They were both in the same boys' brigade troop in the west of Edinburgh, and it was John Swinney that first appointed Peter Murrell as the chief executive of the Scottish National Party in 2001.

8:27and when Swinney was asked that question how he felt personally he himself was very clearly very close to tears he gripped the podium with both his hands you could almost see his knuckles turning white he looked down and he started stumbling over his words as he tried to control himself The level of personal horror, betrayal that I feel is difficult for me to properly convey to you But I just, this is beyond what I'm thinking about. So I would imagine that for both him and for Sturgeon, they are going through a very similar degree of emotional turmoil, a sense of humiliation, a sense of embarrassment, and also a sense of anger towards him.

9:11And what about Scottish voters in general? Do we know, are they buying the story that she's telling them about her role in all of this? I mean obviously in some respects it's too soon to know but there was one initial snap poll for the Sunday Times in Scotland by the polling agency Nordstap which published on Sunday and that found that Scottish voters as a whole by a margin of three to one doubted that Nicola Sturgeon was telling the full truth and that Nordstap poll also tested exactly how many people who voted SMP felt and they actually found that a very significant number of SNP voters, around 37%, did not accept her account.

9:56Now, it is important to stress that this is before the full Kunzberg interview was broadcast, but it's certainly a significant blow to the party and to her and to her reputation.

10:12Severin, could you put all of this in context for us? Nicola Sturgeon, she's always said she's completely innocent. She knew nothing about what her ex-husband, Marl, was up to. But nevertheless, last week, he pleaded guilty to embezzling more than£400 ,000 from the SNP to buy what exactly? Could you remind us of that extraordinary list that we had? It was very odd. I mean, some of the items on that list were trinkets, very, very prosaic. They included coffee pods. We know that he spent around£85 buying two kilograms of Nescafe gold blend coffee powder. They included toilet rolls. But what they also included was£124 ,000 luxury motorhome, which was parked in the drive or next to Peter Murrell's mother's house in Fife.

11:04In there were also two cars, a VW Golf and a Jaguar I-Pace. And there were, of course, the luxury watches. There were luxury pens. There were the Lalique salt and pepper grinders. There were also iPads, Kindles, Xbox games, a copy of Gran of Their Daughter where he could play a criminal. And then he also spent£160 buying a very beautifully embellished Folio Society edition of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. And alongside that, you had some very odd things. I mean, he also would have paid£75 for the complete Seasons 1 and 2 DVDs of Borgen, Nicola Sturgeon's favourite television series.

11:46He bought a box set of Sherlock Holmes. He bought a robotic lawnmower that cost£3 ,000. And the police indictment said that that included installation as well, folks. It was almost as if you had a teenager funding their entertainment habits and a lavish lifestyle on somebody else's credit card. But also in there, there were times where you saw that Murrell was actually buying gifts for people. And Nicola Sturgeon actually mentioned that in her interview, didn't she? That one of the moments she got so emotional was talking about this necklace that was gifted to her that turned out to be in that list as well, right?

12:23Peter said to me, I've got a surprise for you and I saw you admiring this pendant and gave me it. Sorry. I loved that necklace and I wore it a lot and this is the other thing. The idea that I would have gone about wearing things that I had known were anything other than what they were presented to me as a gift from my husband and to then find out that these were gifts given to me that he'd bought with the party's money causes a level of, I don't know, pain, bewilderment. I don't know, I just... He presented it to her as a present and she wore it very proudly ever since. She even matched her clothing, the outfits that she wore, to go with the colouring of the pendant.

13:13This whole affair is about her private life, not about her political life. No. And I think that's why she was so emotional about it.

13:31You know, we've just talked about that really sad story about the pendant, which I found really, really sad. You know, the betrayal in that is a very personal betrayal, isn't it? But the list of what he was buying, as you said, is extraordinary. And I wondered, in your reporting, did you ever hear any gossip or speculation about his kind of spending habits? You know, do we know what he did with all this stuff that he bought or what he was intending to do with all this stuff? No, we didn't. It has to be stated from the beginning that Murrell was actually very, very private, generally. The only insight into any prior knowledge about the fact that he may have actually been a thief was the disclosure after his guilty plea last Monday that he had allegedly stolen some money in the north-east of Scotland when he was working for Alex Salmond in the late 1980s.

14:22So Alex Salmond, the former First Minister before Nicola Sturgeon. There are different stories about what Salmond then did. One person has been saying very recently that Salmond effectively sacked him from his job. But what we do know is that Salmond did hush that affair up. Salmond paid the money and Murrell continued working inside the SNP. And one particular phrase came to light last week that he was known to some people as Magpie Murrell. Could you just remind us, what was his role in the SNP and how was he able to do this? It may sound like I'm overstating it, but Peter Murrell was one of the most powerful people in British politics.

15:00He had been the chief executive of the most successful and the most effective electoral machine since 2001. And in partnership with Alex Salmond, particularly when Salmond became leader again in 2004, they were able to build a party machine effectively from scratch. So the process of going from a minority party to a party in 2007, which had won more seats than any other party. It was a process that was actually run in control by Peter Murrell. He was in charge of setting up all of the structures and the mechanisms that were used for the SMP's funding, the SMP's accounts, the SMP's office organisation.

15:45And he was also the person, one assumes, that was appointing all the office staff that were helping him run the SMP machine. And so when you get to a point of that level of authority and influence and power over an organisation that you basically built. And you're also married to the boss. So what you're saying is that, you know, much more than being Nicola Sturgeon's husband and, you know, having that power by association with her, he was really pivotal to building the SNP as we know it today. And also this hugely influential politician in Scotland with what seems like unfettered power. One of the most revealing things that became clear in the indictment was that Murrell had been using the names of his own office staff to commit some of these frauds.

16:35And these are people that had worked for him in a small team for years. So he not only portrayed Sturgeon, he portrayed office staff that had shown enormous amount of loyalty for a party and for a boss that they believed in. The police say that he went to extraordinary lengths to give himself the space to steal all this money, but also to cover it up. And Severin, yesterday there was another hearing which revealed even more about Murrell's crimes. What did we learn? So Annie, what we had in court yesterday was what they call a narrative description from the prosecution about the specifics of Peter Murrell's offences, exactly how he'd covered things up, the way he had lied to people, and also when he had bought things and even where they were posted to.

17:22The most, in a sense, entertaining fact was that the most famous of his purchases, the£124 ,000 luxury motorhome, was driven a total of four miles. Right. He drove it from the place he picked it up at to his mother's home in Dunfermline, a whole total of four miles, and then left it parked next to her house for more than two years. It never left there. How bizarre. It's quite odd. And the thing which is also very revealing about it is that the information that we had from the prosecution was that while it was sitting there, he did actually stock it up with a whole number of luxury items. He bought Joseph and Joseph and Le Creuset kitchen and homeware.

18:02He bought Moulton and Brown toiletries, which you can see in the police photographs, are very neatly arranged around the hand basin in the motorhome. Nicola Sturgeon herself is adamant that she didn't know that the motorhome existed. Now, I genuinely, genuinely don't have any conscious memory of seeing that motorhome. If I saw it, I probably would have assumed it was a neighbour's. My mother and father-in-law were in their mid-80s. I would have just not... It would not have crossed my mind it was theirs, and it would never have... Why would it have crossed my mind that it was the SNPs that Peter had bought it?

18:37Well, if you go to... She didn't know he'd bought it. The party didn't know he'd bought it. and it was pretty clear that he never actually used it. One wonders what was going through his mind, but it is an interesting insight into how secretive he was, how acquisitive he was, and also how attracted he was to luxury items. He just obviously clearly loved having luxury all around him. What the additional details may actually suggest is that Murrell was quite careful to avoid Nicola Sturgeon being aware of what he was doing, because the prosecution detailed how very often he sent his illicit goods, these luxury items he'd been buying using the stolen money from the SNP, he'd had them delivered at the SNP's headquarters in Edinburgh.

19:20So much of the stuff she would never have known had arrived. And we also discovered, as the indictment implied, that a lot of the material was actually being sent to family members. I mean, the man earned£107 ,000 a year. And so naturally, they would have thought, OK, he can afford this. Uncle Peter's a really nice guy. Right. Really nice guy with other people's money, it turns out. Yeah. And when did people start noticing that there could be money missing from SNP accounts? The reason the police began the investigation had nothing to do with Peter Murrell allegedly embezzling anything. It was because a major crisis had arisen over the apparent disappearance of more than£600 ,000 which had been raised from party members and from Yes campaigners to ostensibly fund a second independence referendum.

20:12In late 2020, the first questions began to emerge about what had happened to this missing£600 ,000. This money was not appearing in the SNP's official accounts, but then it emerged that actually some of the money was being spent on SNP election campaigns. Party treasurers were stepping down claiming that they hadn't been given access to the party accounts. And this whole crisis also became a proxy for the battle going on inside the SNP between people that wanted to unseat Nicola Sturgeon, who were critical and very unhappy with her positions, her policies around trans rights, her positions on Nazi oil and gas, or her general drift to the progressive left.

20:54And that's part of the reason she became so defensive, that she felt that her critics were weaponising one particular issue in order to conduct a wider war against her leadership of the party. And maybe why we saw her be so defensive in that interview last weekend as well. That kind of battle-hardened approach to defending her position. Exactly that. And also, you know, maybe a tried and tested method because in 2018, Alex Salmond, the former First Minister and her mentor, faced multiple allegations of sexual misconduct from his time in office. Alex Salmond arrived at Edinburgh Sheriff's Court to face 14 charges, including two of attempted rape.

21:39Yeah, ultimately, he was cleared, but it was a huge scandal, wasn't it? I mean, she also managed to distance herself quite firmly from that as well. Yeah, and that actually is quite an important precursor to what we're witnessing now, because the question arises as to why Nicola Sturgeon, in two very, very significant crises and scandals, appeared to be none the wiser. You know him well, you keep your ear to the ground. Had you heard any stories about him before it broke in the press? Of this nature, absolutely not. Until, well, I've said previously, Alex Salmond informed me about these complaints in April.

22:18That was the first I had known. We as journalists had been hearing rumours that Alex Salmond had been having extramarital affairs and there were even questions about whether he had been guilty of some kind of sexual misconduct or misdemeanours. Those had been the stuff of political gossip for decades. And Nicola Sturgeon denied any knowledge of those whatsoever. And for many people, that just stretched credulity, given the closeness of their relationship that Nicola Sturgeon had been mentored by Alex Salmond. And if you wanted to take a positive slant on that, the only conclusion one would draw is that people that knew about these rumors about Salmon's conduct or knew of the specific allegations had made a deliberate decision to withhold that information from Nicola Sturgeon in order to avoid poisoning their relationship or in order to avoid giving her knowledge of something that they were helping to conceal.

23:16And that actually is the most serious issue of all, is you have a political party, an organisation where lots of difficult and damaging issues aren't being surfaced and aired because the overriding motivation amongst people in the SNP hierarchy is to protect the brand and protect the cause. The brand is the SNP, the cause is seeking Scottish independence. Everything else is either secondary or just noise. And that's partly, I believe, why Nicola Sturgeon and why the SNP are in the position they're in now. And it's also, you know, it stretches credulity as well, doesn't it? This idea of, well, no one told me, no one told me again and again and again that you didn't just see Sturgeon but other SNP senior politicians take.

24:02And that's a really good point, that kind of closing of ranks to protect the brand. The most important thing to remember about the two greatest crises that Sturgeon has to weather as First Minister, the Salmond sexual misconduct crisis and the moral crisis, is that with Salmond, there was so much evidence and in fact testimony that people in the government and SNP apparatus knew about the allegations against Salmond. And they often chose not to tell Nicola Sturgeon about what they knew. The moral affair is in a different category, because it seems abundantly clear there was no inkling or evidence at all until the police stumbled across some sort of moment of revelation during their investigation into the£600 ,000 that had gone missing, that in fact their inquiry was actually about embezzlement.

24:57It wasn't about misappropriated funding. But only Murrell has been charged, and there is no evidence that anybody else was complicit in this. There is no evidence that anybody knew and covered it up. Sturgeon has been investigated, interviewed, cleared. Everybody involved in you, Murrell, have just genuinely struggled to understand how this happened under their noses. If Peter Murrell's going to be sentenced later this month, what kind of consequences could he be facing? I think many of us expect he's going to be given a custodial sentence, a term of imprisonment. And even though this was a first offence, the judge himself spoke to the core fact that he had deliberately and very cleverly deceived so many people and betrayed a party and the party's membership.

25:47We don't know exactly how long the sentence will be, but one could imagine he's going to face several years in jail.

25:56Coming up, how badly will this damage the SNP?

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