Nicola Sturgeon is not a victim of theft and fraud. This mere truism bears stressing. In her BBC interview with Laura Kuenssberg this morning, the former Scottish first minister remarkably depicted herself as a wronged party. The crimes of her estranged husband, Peter Murrell, had – you see – put her “into a position of real peril” and subjected her “to public vilification”.
This tearful performance was frustrating for viewers, as it failed to elicit hard information. For Sturgeon herself, it was disastrous. She came across as evasive, self-pitying and reflexively impenitent. She was unintentionally revealing when insisting that, as it was her husband rather than herself who had embezzled £400,000, she owed no apology. She demonstrated thereby a lamentable failure to grasp the public significance of the scandal.
First, even supposing Murrell had been a figure of integrity, it was always dubious that a married couple should hold the posts respectively of leader and chief executive of the governing party in the Scottish Parliament. Second, it was in her capacity as SNP leader, not as the unwitting spouse of a crook, that Sturgeon stymied the financial scrutiny that would have exposed Murrell’s crimes much earlier.
