Nicola Sturgeon speaks to the BBC
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What led to Nicola Sturgeon's first interview after the scandal?
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Hi everyone, it's Laura here. Unless you've been living on a different planet, you'll doubtless have seen stories about the huge financial scandal that has engulfed the SNP. Nicola Sturgeon, the former First Minister of Scotland, was hit for a long time by allegations that financial impropriety in the party had been going on under her nose. But at the end of May, her husband, the chief executive, Peter Murrell, pleaded guilty to embezzling £400,000. There have been stories of buying pepper pots that cost £3,000, of buying Game Boys, of Playstations, and of course, that notorious motorhome. But only Peter Murrell was ever charged. What did Nicola Sturgeon herself know about what was going on? She sat down with me to give, for the first time, her full account of the story.
You can watch our conversation on iPlayer or YouTube, but here we thought you'd want to hear the longer version of our full conversation. And in the next episode in your feed, me, Henry and Joe Pike will talk about what it means.
Newscast from the BBC.
Nicola Sturgeon, thank you very much for speaking to us today. Everyone in the country is asking. Peter Murrow, your husband for many years, pled guilty to stealing £400,000 from the party that you led for many years. You've said you didn't know anything, but as the person who shared his life, as his wife, did you really not notice anything? I absolutely didn't know that he was committing crimes. Look, I understand that question. It's human nature. If I was on the outside looking in on this happening to somebody else, it's very probably a question I would be asking too. You know, I think that question, though, is based on a lot of assumptions that are perhaps understandable, but are completely wrong.
The first assumption is that I knew about all of the things that he was purchasing. There's a lot of the items that have been mentioned in the court documents and therefore by extension in the press that I wasn't aware of. These are things I had never seen. I'm reading and some of it I was reading online. on Monday, the day he pled guilty for the first time, items that I just wasn't aware of. And that's quite difficult for me to come to terms with. Some of the items I was aware of, including things he'd bought for me as gifts and presented to me as gifts that he had bought for me, None of these things I would have looked at and thought, how on earth could he afford them? You know, we were two people on high salaries.
We don't have children. We didn't have. an extensive social life, mainly because of the pressures of my job. We very rarely went on holiday. So we had incomes that would, as far as I could see, would have supported anything that I was seeing in my house. I think the other thing, which is just a fact of life, I was the first minister of the country. I was working round the clock most days. I wasn't at home very often. I didn't take... much, if anything, to do with the administration of our household. I mean, just to explain how our finances work, we had separate bank accounts. I never had any access to his bank account. He didn't have any to mine. Every month I would pass him a sum of money to cover my share of the household expenses and leave him to it and give him a bit more because I was First Minister.
Occasionally I'd phone him up and say, I've run out of something, will you get me this? So no, I didn't know. And You know, I'm not the first, and unfortunately I'm sure I won't be the last woman to be betrayed and lied to and misled by her husband, and that's what happened. But this was much more than the odd thing here or there, or routine household items. Some of them were very basic.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What led to Nicola Sturgeon's first interview after the scandal?
0:00–6:36
2
What did Nicola Sturgeon know about Peter Murrell's actions?
6:36–11:31
3
How did Sturgeon respond to allegations of financial impropriety?
11:31–23:06
4
What was the impact of the scandal on Nicola Sturgeon's personal life?
23:06–34:23
5
Why did Sturgeon not notice the financial discrepancies in the SNP?
34:23–54:49
6
How did the police investigation affect Nicola Sturgeon's reputation?
54:49–59:03