Not since the then-Prince Andrew’s car-crash Panorama interview with Emily Maitlis have we seen such a brass-neck performance from a leading public figure as Nicola Sturgeon gave the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg this weekend.Nicola took to our screens to explain how, for more than a decade, she had failed to notice her husband Peter Murrell’s extravagant spending habits – including shopping sprees for £4,500 watches and a £4,200 fountain pen, all of which he funded by defrauding his wife’s SNP party of £400,000. But in Sturgeon’s interview with Auntie’s ferocious interrogator on Sunday, we were left none the wiser.There was no apology. In fact, Nicola defiantly refused to apologise even to her SNP supporters, whose donations were embezzled by her own husband.She insisted she was speaking out not just ’for my own sake, but for... a lot of women who end up finding themselves blamed for the actions of the men in their lives’.A cheap shot Nicola, even for you. Is this wealthy, powerful woman really in a position to draw parallels between herself and ordinary women who suffer for their partner's failings?With a face as hard as her helmet hair, Nicola insisted she knew nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing – not even the roar of the £81,000 Jaguar I-PACE hubby had bought, which was parked outside their marital home. She had been photographed walking past it while clutching a £700 bag.Not the gurgling of their £2,595 coffee machine as he made a morning brew, or the grinding of the £2,618 crystal Lalique salt and pepper mills over their poached eggs. Nicola Sturgeon was interviewed by the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday, and refused to apologise after her estranged husband Peter Murrell pleaded guilty to embezzling £400,000 from the SNP Nicola said: ‘Yes, I’m angry, but I am also carrying a degree of hurt and I think a degree of trauma. What he has done to me will take me a very, very long time to recover from'I’m a former political spin doctor, so I'm familiar with handling crises like these. And I can say with conviction this was a clearly rehearsed performance and a carefully crafted ‘line of attack’: play the ‘betrayed woman‘ card. Say on repeat: ‘I was deceived, I was innocent.’Adding to her nauseatingly self-pitying narrative, Nicola said: ‘Yes, I’m angry, but I am also carrying a degree of hurt and I think a degree of trauma. What he has done to me will take me a very, very long time to recover from.’The laugh-out-loud moment came when she said: ‘I’m out here feeling as if I’m serving a sentence for a crime I did not commit... I am not going to apologise for somebody else’s crimes.’Nice try, Nicola. But it rings as fake as the crocodile tears you tried to wipe away.The ‘poor me’ narrative – dreamt up, I have no doubt, after long nights with her expensive advisers – was as pathetic as it was insincere.Her explanation as to how she never noticed the £124,550 luxury motorhome parked on her mother-in-law’s drive is beyond parody.Nicola didn’t see her husband’s parents very often, she said, adding: ‘I genuinely don’t have any conscious memory of seeing the [24ft] motorhome. If I saw it, I would probably have assumed it was a neighbour’s.Nicola Sturgeon, a shrewd, clever, ruthless, long-surviving politician, now portraying herself as a victim of an exploitative man? It just doesn’t wash with me.I wonder if, after her interview with Kuenssberg, Sturgeon – so full of hubris – turned to her advisers as the former Prince Andrew once did and said smugly: ‘Well, that went exceptionally well.’ The £124,550 motorhome purchased by Murrell that was shown during a hearing at the High Court in Edinburgh. Sturgeon said she did not see the motorhome, which was parked on her mother-in-law's drive, adding: 'If I saw it, I would probably have assumed it was a neighbour’s’ Sturgeon was seen clutching a £700 bag while walking past the £81,000 Jaguar I-PACE parked outside their marital homeIt’s hard to believe that someone with her nous could be blinded by the actions of a man she shared a home with until only last year. She said emotionally, ‘This has been probably the worst week of my life‘, adding: ‘I absolutely didn’t know he was committing crimes’.Well, Nicola certainly hasn’t been too traumatised over the past few weeks to flog her new memoir Frankly on the book fair circuit, charging people £25 to hear her speak.How long before she reveals she’s managed to write the sequel to Frankly, maybe called the Bride Of Frankly – or should that be Frankenstein? That’s got a ‘kerching’ ring to it.It seems Nicola’s memoir has given her inspiration in her attempts at rehabilitation. In Frankly, she told readers that the world of politics is beset by misogyny.‘Like all women, since the dawn of time, I have faced misogyny and sexism so endemic that I didn’t always recognise it as such,’ she wrote on the first page.In fact, ‘misogyny’ appears 16 times in her memoir – it even has its own index entry.Promoting the book at the Hay Festival last week, Sturgeon lamented what she called ‘the age-old cry’ that when ‘a man does something wrong, well, the woman must have known about it, somehow it’s her fault’.All I can say is that the former First Minister should have applied the hawk-eye she clearly has for sexism to her own husband’s spending habits.