NICOLA Sturgeon has said that “sexism and misogyny” are a big part of the reason that people have alleged that she knew about Peter Murrell’s criminal behaviour while it was ongoing.
Murrell, the former SNP chief executive and estranged husband of Sturgeon, was jailed in June after pleading guilty to embezzling £400,000 from the SNP over a 12-year period, from 2010 to 2022.
Sturgeon has repeatedly denied any knowledge of Murrell’s crimes, saying she was lied to and betrayed, a position she reiterated on Saturday while speaking to Iain Dale for an All Talk show at the Edinburgh Fringe.
The former SNP leader further told the festival crowd that she had “learned a lot about what he did at the same time all of you did, because over three years he never really levelled with me”.
Talking specifically about allegations that she had known of Murrell’s crimes, Sturgeon then said: “To reverse this for a second, imagine I'd been a male first minister and my wife had committed the crime. Is that what would have been said? Or instead, would the narrative have been, ‘well, he was busy, he was running the country, how was he meant to know what his wife was doing?’
“I'm not trying to escape legitimate scrutiny and accountability. I just think that there has been – there is – an element, quite a big element, of sexism and misogyny over how I've been treated in relation to the crimes of a man, that wouldn't have been the case had I been the man.”
Sturgeon said she felt that Murrell had “had an easier bloody ride than I've had”, adding: “It feels deeply unjust and deeply unfair.”
The former first minister further told Dale that she had not spoken to Murrell since he was jailed and she would not visit him in prison.
She said she only discovered he was due to plead guilty a few days before he appeared in court, and when it emerged he had been negotiating his plea for months before then, it “hit me like a tonne of bricks”.
“He was still lying to me right up until the day he pled guilty,” Sturgeon said.
She added: “He was very isolated over that period, he very rarely left the house, he wasn’t communicative, I was a bit worried about his well-being and his mental health.
“And then, now I think: ‘What a mug, why were you worried about him?’ He didn’t worry about me. He didn’t worry at all about what he was doing.
‘What he has subjected me to is beyond anything I could ever have comprehended.
“I don’t understand why he did it, he had no need to do it, I don’t think I will ever understand his motivations.
“But whatever that motivation was, he could not have stopped and ever thought about me.
“But I was, until recently, still worrying about him.”
Asked if she would visit him in prison, Sturgeon replied: “No.”
She added: “I’m not going to speak to him, I’m not going to visit him.”
