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NICOLA Sturgeon has come out fighting in recent days in the media after her estranged husband Peter Murrell admitted embezzling £400,000 from the SNP.
On Sunday in her interview with the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg she revealed the deep pain the scandal had caused her and even got emotional on camera at points.
She said she never questioned many of the extravagant purchases Murrell made because they were on high salaries. She said she had never asked about an £80,000 Jaguar he had bought adding she had "no interest in cars".
Others she did not know about. She denied having any "conscious memory" of seeing the infamous motorhome parked at her mother-in-law's.
She has also attacked the media saying she has been on more front pages than Murrell, adding she feels as if she is “serving a sentence for a crime I did not commit".
But her defensive approach has not gone down terribly well with the public. A poll from Norstat over the weekend showed only 20% of Scots accept she did not know about the crimes committed by Murrell.
So why has her strategy not worked?
Dr Michael Higgins, a media and communications expert at the University of Strathclyde, said Sturgeon had to come out and say something or the narrative would've been taken away from her.
But he was surprised she refused to apologise or express any regret over what has happened.
He told The National: "I think she’s come out fighting largely because if she doesn’t do that then the way in which this is discussed would be left almost exclusively to her enemies.
"Most of the media are, at best, suspicious and at worst, hostile, towards Sturgeon’s involvement in this and if she hadn’t conducted these interviews, her voice wouldn’t be heard.
"There was the option to not do the interviews at all and I think actually that may well have been a viable option, but perhaps Nicola Sturgeon took the view she has a public profile and she has a public reputation […] to defend and she felt it was an obligation to do that."
However, he added: "It didn’t strike me that she availed herself of good advice prior to this interview, which with her previous interviews while she was in office she would've done.
"It may well be she was advised and advised poorly. But I did find it peculiar that she didn’t in any way offer expressions of regret and refused to apologise. I think she could’ve offered some kind of note of regret and I think that would’ve been also more consistent with her own show of emotions."
Higgins also suggested though that the way in which Sturgeon has been portrayed online and in the media makes it hard for her to be convincing when vulnerable.
"The difficulty Nicola Sturgeon had in showing real vulnerability is that that clashes with the raft of long-standing, mainly misogynist tropes, that are in public circulation, especially on social media but sometimes in mainstream media about Nicola Sturgeon," he said.
"They present her as nippy, they call her Jimmy Krankie. None of these lend themselves to a convincing show of emotional vulnerability. The whole disrespectful discourse of Nicola Sturgeon has presented her as belligerent, unemotional, has removed her gender identity from her, has infantilised her.
"If you’re surrounded by people who are offering similar views of Nicola Sturgeon and have been now for a good number of years and then suddenly you see this vulnerable woman on television in tears describing a distressing experiences, then those two realities are going to be difficult to reconcile."
Paul Reilly, a lecturer in communications, media and democracy at the University of Glasgow, also said there was little Sturgeon could've done to break through the preconceptions people have of her.
"I think if a politician comes out and says ‘yes I did it’ or apologises they are viewed as weak and it’s a reflection of how partisan politics has become, particularly with people calling things online," he said.
"They are quick to judge, and I think since Nicola Sturgeon stood down I think there are probably a lot of people who are critical of her and this is another weapon to beat her with, so I don’t think there’s anything she could say that was not going to meet a certain response.
"Of course, there are people who are very pro-Nicola Sturgeon defending her online and that reflects people are in these separate camps and they’re not likely to change their mind as a result of the revelations."
So perhaps more of a show of remorse may have been useful to Sturgeon in her interviews, but it seems she was likely always damned if she did, damned if she didn't, when it came to speaking out.
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