Saint Nicola

“Look, I understand that question.” Nicola Sturgeon, former First Minister of Scotland and leader of the SNP, was preparing to explain why she hadn’t noticed her husband buying a campervan. Or a coffee machine that cost a grand. Or a coffee machine that cost two grand. Or another coffee machine that cost two grand. Every marriage is at some level a mystery to outsiders, but most of us think we’d notice if our spouse were gearing up to open a mobile branch of Costa.

It was very decent of her to understand why people were asking how it came to be that she hadn’t noticed her house beginning to resemble a Saudi prince’s third home, with games consoles stacked next to Mont Blanc pens and a £2,600 salt-and-pepper grinder set. It was especially decent as it would turn out that anyone asking that question hates women. Over the course of Sturgeon’s hour-long interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, we would learn that only Sid The Sexist thinks that husbands and wives discuss small matters like the provenance of that new Jaguar in the drive.

It’s something of a comedown for someone who once hoped that she’d get a statue as the person who led Scotland to independence to be giving interviews explaining her marriage, but Sturgeon was determined to tough it out, a latter-day Gloria Gaynor explaining that she was a wronged woman.

Since her husband Peter Murrell pled guilty this week to embezzling £400,000 from the SNP, those of us who have occasionally been vague with our partners about the precise cost of the shiny new TV have gazed open-mouthed in wonder at the scale of his achievement. Anyone might hope to get a new DVD boxset into the house unnoticed, but few of us have the ambition to sneak a motorhome into the garage.

“We were two people on high salaries,” Sturgeon explained. “We don’t have children, we didn’t have, you know, 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, have supported anything that I was seeing in my house.”

Not, it turned out, that she would have seen much. “I wasn’t at home very often,” she went on. “Every month I would pass him a sum of money to cover my share of the household expenses and leave him to it.” The tragic thing was that I believed her. It was a picture not of a shared life, but of two lonely people occasionally sharing a house. “We weren’t a normal family,” she said. These had been her choices, but you could still pity someone living with the result. Murrell had bought himself a onesie on expenses. “I never, never ever saw it.”

“I’ve seen people laughing about it,” she went on, reproachfully. Damn right you have. Times are desperate on these islands, and we have to take our pleasure where we can. Laughing at the SNP has long been close to a crime. We forget now, but the first time we encountered populism here was during the independence referendum of 2014, when Sturgeon’s mentor Alex Salmond would invite fanatical supporters into press conferences to boo journalists whose questions he didn’t like.

Sturgeon may have been more likeable, but she similarly surrounded herself with people who were unlikely to challenge her. Perhaps had she been a little more willing to hear disagreement, she might have achieved more. But instead she kept her husband on as chief executive of the party she was leading, and ignored people who resigned over its finances.

Although when Sturgeon sees remarks like that, she knows what she thinks. “I’m just going to say it, there’s a deep misogyny in that,” she explained. “If the leader in question had been a man and it had been women in their lives who’d done bad things I don’t think those kind of commentary pieces would be written.”  Well, maybe. Unless it turns out that Victoria Starmer has bought a Winnebago with stolen Labour Party cash, we simply can’t know whether that would lead to the odd critical article about her husband.

Instead of asking whether Sturgeon should have paid slightly more attention to what her husband was up to, we were invited to sympathise with her. “I’m angry, but I’m also carrying a degree of hurt and I think a degree of trauma,” she said, her voice cracking. But she soldiered on. She will survive.

The last couple of decades have seen a series of iterations of Sturgeon: there was St Nicola The Great, the wildly popular leader whom liberal North Londoners wished they too could vote for, then there was St Nicola The Deaf, who had been completely unaware of the behaviour of Salmond, despite rumours having reached at least as far as London. In 2023 we met St Nicola The Human, who was resigning as First Minister because she wanted to spend more time being an aunty, and definitely not because she had got word that the cops were asking questions about who’d paid for her jewellery. Now in 2026 we’ve got St Nicola TheReal Victim In All This.

“For my own sake, but, you know, for the sake of people out there, a lot of women who end up finding themselves blamed for the actions of the men in their lives, I’m not going to contribute to that kind of sense that I am responsible for somebody else’s crimes,” Sturgeon said. She isn’t dodging the blame for her own sake! She’s doing it for all women! Maybe she’ll get a statue after all.