Former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said she has had “probably the worst week” of her life after her former husband admitted embezzling more than £400,000 from the Scottish National Party (SNP) she once led.
Speaking at Listowel Writers’ Week in County Kerry, Ireland, on Thursday, Sturgeon conceded she was “not OK”, describing herself as having been “deceived”, “misled”, and “betrayed” by her ex-husband, Peter Murrell.
This was her first public appearance since Murrell, from whom she separated in 2025, appeared in court on Monday. He pleaded guilty to embezzling a total of £400,310.65 from the SNP between 2010 and 2022. The funds were used to purchase a motorhome, cars, expensive watches, and a telescope, among other items. Murrell has been remanded in custody pending sentencing.
Sturgeon’s Emotional Address
Addressing the audience, Sturgeon said: “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 admitted she was coming to terms with having “spent many years married to somebody that, as it turns out, I obviously didn’t know at all.” She described this as “a really painful truth to process,” and noted she was “only in the very early stages of processing it.”
Sturgeon acknowledged that the public nature of the turmoil made it even harder, stating: “And then to be in a position of such public turmoil myself makes that even harder.”
Questions and Misunderstandings
Sturgeon said she would “talk much more” in the coming days, but noted that Murrell has yet to be sentenced, so the legal case remains live. She insisted she wanted “people to hear from me my side of this,” accepting that “there are questions.”
She addressed the likely public query: “How can she not have known?” Underlying that, she said, is a “big misassumption” that she knew about the purchases or how they were funded. “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,” she said.
She explained that many items she did recognise did not raise suspicion: “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.” She added, “I never questioned that some of these things he was buying … he could have afforded them.”
A Personal Betrayal
Sturgeon emphasised her sense of betrayal: “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 acknowledged that she will “probably need to sit with a therapist,” and that “this is a long winded way of saying I am not OK.” However, she expressed resilience: “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.”
