They should make a film about Peter Murrell, shouldn’t they? Starring, possibly, Leonardo DiCaprio. Nicola Sturgeon’s ex-husband is not only a crook of shameless proportions, but for a decade or so, he somehow spent like a sailor on shore leave without anyone around him raising so much as an eyebrow. Not for him the discreet Swiss bank account or the mattress stuffed with bearer-bonds. Tom Ripley, Frank Abagnale Jr, Macavity the Mystery Cat: these figures are cautious amateurs by comparison. Is he a hypnotist?
Is there a point at which incuriosity becomes a superpower?
As Sturgeon admitted to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg in her first interview after Murrell pleaded guilty to half-inching nearly half a million quid from the Scottish National Party, were she an ordinary member of the public, on the outside looking in at the scandal that has tanked her marriage and her political career, “How could she not have known?” is exactly the question she would have been asking.
Well, quite. And yet, she tells us that she really didn’t know. Not a thing. “We were both on high salaries,” she said more than once. Peter Murrell had a separate bank account to which she didn’t have access, she reminded us. And she was working jolly hard as First Minister of Scotland, too, so she wasn’t keeping a close eye on the appearance of… all this stuff.
