Nicola Sturgeon has described the past week as “probably the worst” of her life, following her former husband Peter Murrell’s admission of embezzling more than £400,000 from the Scottish National Party (SNP).
The former Scottish first minister confessed she was “not OK” and felt “deceived”, “misled”, and “betrayed” by her ex-husband.
Her emotional comments came during her first public appearance since Mr Murrell, from whom she separated in 2025, appeared in court on Monday.
He has since been remanded in custody after pleading guilty to embezzling a total of £400,310.65 from the SNP between 2010 and 2022. The funds were reportedly spent on a range of luxury items, including a motorhome, cars, expensive watches, and a telescope.
Speaking at Listowel Writers’ Week in Co Kerry, Ms Sturgeon told the audience: “This has been probably the worst week of my life.”
open image in galleryShe 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 reflected on the painful realisation that she had “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,” acknowledging she is only in the “very early stages of processing it.” Ms Sturgeon added that being in a position of “such public turmoil myself makes that even harder.”
While she indicated it would take her “some time to properly come to terms” with the events, she promised to “talk much more” in the coming days, noting that the legal case against Mr Murrell is still active ahead of his sentencing.
However, Ms Sturgeon insisted she wanted “people to hear from me my side of this,” accepting that “there are questions.”
She directly addressed the public’s likely queries: “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?’.”
She countered this by stating: “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.”
Ms Sturgeon explained that she was “reading about things in the newspapers for the first time” as recently as Monday, referring to items she had “never seen, I didn’t know about.”
She clarified: “It wasn’t just that I didn’t question where they came from.” For items she did recognise, she maintained that “none of it would have made me question how he could afford it.” She cited their combined high salaries and lack of children, alongside her demanding job that kept her working “round the clock, away from home 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,” she conceded. “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.”
Reiterating her sense of betrayal, Ms Sturgeon stated: “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.” She acknowledged that “the circumstances might be unusual and difficult.”
Concluding her remarks, Ms Sturgeon suggested she would “probably need to sit with a therapist,” summarising her current state: “this is a long winded way of saying I am not OK.”
Despite the profound personal impact, 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).” She acknowledged the added difficulty of dealing with such a personal crisis “in the full glare of publicity,” confirming: “So yes, it will be a process.”