Nicola Surgeon has said she will not visit her estranged husband, Peter Murrell, in prison, has stopped speaking to him and views herself as a “mug” for worrying about his wellbeing and mental health earlier this year.
During a podcast recording at the Edinburgh festival fringe, Scotland’s former first minister said Murrell had lied to her until the day he pleaded guilty to embezzling more than £400,000 from the Scottish National party.
He was imprisoned for five years in June, and Sturgeon revealed she had not spoken to him since then. She told the broadcaster Iain Dale she had only discovered Murrell was due to plead guilty a week before he appeared in court.
She later found out he had been negotiating his plea for months.
“[That] hit me like a tonne of bricks,” she said. “He was still lying to me right up until the day he pled guilty.”
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 wellbeing 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. I’m not going to speak to him, I’m not going to visit him.”
The former first minister said that when Murrell was in court she was still finding out details of the purchases he had made using party funds.
“Over the years, he never really levelled with me,” she said. “The day he pled guilty, I was still learning about some of the detail of what he had done for the first time. I suddenly realised I had been living with somebody that I never really knew properly.
“That’s something for me to come to terms with, and I don’t think I’m there yet, but also for my family to come to terms with. It’s a really difficult process.”
Murrell, 61, spent the money on items including a motorhome, a Jaguar SUV and a VW Golf, boutique cosmetics, iPads and a pair of Lalique Feuilles salt and pepper grinders worth £2,618.
Sturgeon, 55, has consistently denied knowledge of his crimes, which spanned the years 2010 to 2022, and was not charged after a police investigation.
She has previously said she made an error of judgment by keeping Murrell on as SNP chief executive when she became party leader in November 2014, but refused to apologise for his crimes and denied ever “consciously” seeing the motorhome he bought and stored at her mother-in-law’s house.
