𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

The former Scottish National Party leader finds herself in a tricky spot, with former husband Peter Murrell remanded in custody after embezzling more than £400,000 from the SNP over a 12-year period. Prosecutors allege the party’s former chief executive used SNP funds to bankroll a lavish lifestyle that included a £124,550 Niesmann + Bischoff motorhome, a £81,277 Jaguar I-Pace, luxury jewellery, designer cosmetics, expensive pens, £2,500 silver salt and pepper pots and most absurdly of all, a £349 Dyson hairdryer. Murrell is bald. The question everybody is asking is this: how much did Sturgeon know?

Her answer has the virtue of simplicity. Nothing. Not a jot. Fair enough. Plenty of men conceal things from their wives. But a luxury motorhome? Murrell clearly wasn’t a criminal mastermind. His cunning sleight of hand was to stash the vehicle at his mother’s house. Bang in the middle of the driveway. Sturgeon’s trick is to pretend she never noticed it. If she convinces SNP members of that, she really is a political magician. I was at my mother-in-law’s last week. If I’d spotted a gleaming new motorhome parked by the front door, I’d have remarked on it. If my partner rocked up in a slinky new Jaguar I-Pace, I’d definitely have asked questions. Nicola Sturgeon apparently didn’t.

Now that the details have emerged, her next trick is to deny everything and play innocent. That requires a huge leap of faith given the sheer scale of the spending. Harry Potter author JK Rowling has mocked her lack of awareness on social media, joking that “every other day a new motorhome appears in my mother-in-law’s drive”, adding that her partner “hands me another bucket full of jewellery and cosmetics I can only assume he’s got himself a part time job I’m too busy to ask about”.

Sturgeon even wore one of the pieces of jewellery, a Northern Lights pendant necklace, during a television interview. That makes the whole “I never noticed anything” line even harder to swallow. Maybe the police should check whether her dabs are on that salt and pepper grinder.

This type of thing is catching. Sturgeon wasn’t the only senior SNP figure to be slow on the uptake. Current first minister John Swinney knew about Murrell for a year but said nothing publicly. Now he’s resisting calls for further scrutiny into what already ranks as the worst scandal in Scottish Parliament Holyrood’s history. But let’s return to Sturgeon for the really slippery part.

Sturgeon claimed she cooperated fully with police inquiries. It turns out that her definition of cooperation involved saying “no comment” to every question detectives put. She has every legal right to do that. But I wouldn’t call it cooperative. Then she pulled another trick, by playing the feminist card saying: “I won’t be the last woman who has been betrayed by her husband.”

She doubled down with the noble assertion that: “I will not apologise for crimes of my former husband.” To make sure she’d covered all the bases, she then switched to victim mode, as people do these days. “I have been misled, I have been lied to and I have been betrayed,” she declared.

Note: That’s three “I”s in 14 words. Which tells us a lot. It turns out that the biggest casualty in this entire sordid affair is ‘wee nippy’ herself as she made clear by whining: “This has been probably the worst week of my life and you know the last few years have had some tough ones for me, but this one, I think, surpasses all of them.”

Personally, I thought the real victims were SNP supporters whose donations allegedly funded the power couple’s luxury trinkets and toys. Sturgeon has done everything to convince the public to believe her, but there’s still one trick she hasn’t tried. Claiming she’s literally blind. On recent form, I wouldn’t put it past her.