FORMER SCOTTISH FIRST minister Nicola Sturgeon said she is having “probably the worst week” of her life after her former husband admitted embezzling more than £400,000 from the party she once led.
Conceding she was “not OK”, the former SNP leader said she had been “deceived”, “misled” and “betrayed” by her ex-husband, Peter Murrell.
Her comments came as she appeared in public for the first time since Murrell, who she separated from in 2025, appeared in court on Monday.
He has been remanded in custody after pleading guilty to embezzling a total of £400,310.65 from the Scottish National Party (SNP) between 2010 and 2022 – with the cash spent on a range of items including a motorhome, cars, expensive watches and a telescope.
Speaking at Listowel Writers’ Week in Co Kerry, Sturgeon told the audience: “This has been probably the worst week of my life.”
She added: “The last few years have had some tough ones for me, but this one, I think, surpasses all of them.”
The former SNP leader stressed she had been “completely exonerated” after a “two-year-long, very forensic police investigation” which saw police officers search the home she and Murrell had shared.
I have been deceived. I have been misled, I have been lied to and I have been betrayed.
Sturgeon was also arrested and questioned by police as part of that, and she insisted she had “fully co-operated” with Police Scotland.
Asked about reports she said “no comment” to officers’ questions, Sturgeon insisted: “I did answer Police Scotland’s questions.”
She continued: “I followed the advice of my lawyer in a very stressful situation. I think most people would follow the advice of their lawyer.”
She added that after the police interview she “sent a fully detailed written response to the questions that the police had put to me”, saying that she “never heard any more from them for two years until they told me I was cleared”.
The former SNP leader said she was now coming to terms with having “spent many years married to somebody that, as it turns out, I obviously didn’t know at all”.
She added: “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.”
Adding that it would take her “some time to properly come to terms” with what had happened, she said she would “talk much more” in the coming says – adding that with Murrell still to be sentenced, the legal case against him is still live.
But she insisted she wanted “people to hear from me my side of this”, accepting that “there are questions”.
Sturgeon said: “I know there are questions, I understand that. I would probably be asking as well if I was looking in from the outside on somebody else. ‘How can she not have known?’.
“And 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.
“I think everybody assumes that all of this stuff that it turns out my former husband was buying I knew about it, I just didn’t question how he paid for it.
“As recently as Monday I was reading about things in the newspapers for the first time, things that I had never seen, I didn’t know about.
“It wasn’t just that I didn’t question where they came from.”
She continued: “Things that I did recognise, none of it would have made me question how he could afford it.
“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 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.”
She also insisted: “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.
“The circumstances might be unusual and difficult.”
She added that she would “probably need to sit with a therapist”, saying that “this is a long winded way of saying I am not OK”.
However she said: “I will be OK, I am a strong resilient person, I have had to be over the last few years, but this is a tough thing to come to terms (with).
“And it would be a tough thing to come to terms with for anyone who is dealing with this entirely privately, but I am not, I am having to deal with it in the full glare of publicity. So yes, it will be a process.”