Nicola Sturgeon: I feel as if I’m serving a sentence for a crime I did not commit

Nicola Sturgeon speaking on BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme. Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA View image in fullscreen Nicola Sturgeon speaking on BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme. Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA Nicola Sturgeon: I feel as if I’m serving a sentence for a crime I did not commit Former Scottish first minister says she will not apologise for actions of her ex-husband found guilty of embezzlement Nicola Sturgeon has said she feels as if she is serving a sentence for a crime she did not commit, as she denied ever “consciously” seeing the motor home bought by her estranged husband with money embezzled from the Scottish National party. Scotland’s former first minister said the luxury camper was parked “round the side” of her mother-in-law’s house and had been recorded in the party’s accounts as “motor vehicles” so its purchase had not rung alarm bells. In her first media interview since Peter Murrell pleaded guilty to embezzling more than £400,000 from the SNP, Sturgeon denied that whistleblowers were blocked from flagging concerns, saying their concern had been on funds raised to fight a second independence referendum instead. Sturgeon, 55, has consistently denied knowledge of Murrell’s crimes, which spanned more than a decade between 2010 and 2022, and was not charged after a police investigation. However, she has faced a sceptical Scottish public after it emerged Murrell, 61, spent the money on items including a motor home, a Jaguar SUV and a VW Golf, boutique cosmetics, iPads and a pair of Lalique Feuilles salt and pepper grinders worth £2,618. Sturgeon said she had visited her mother-in-law’s home “less than a handful of times” over the two-year period the motor home was parked on the driveway, and denied she had walked past it to enter the house. “[Her] house has a driveway in front of the house where we would park our car, and then we would go into the house. Where the motor home was, was round the side of the house, which is not immediately visible in the way we went into the house,” the former politician told BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show. “It’s between the house and the next-door neighbour’s house. I genuinely have no conscious memory of seeing that motor home. If I saw it, I would probably have assumed it was the neighbour’s. “My mother- and father-in-law were in their mid-80s. It wouldn’t have crossed my mind that it was theirs … and why would it have crossed my mind it was the SNP’s, that Peter had bought it?” View image in fullscreen Peter Murrell arrives at the high court in Edinburgh on Monday. He pleaded guilty to embezzling more than £400,000 from the SNP. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images Sturgeon said that in the SNP’s accounts – which she examined as a member of the party’s ruling national executive committee – the motor home was recorded as “motor vehicles”, which did not appear out of place “We would routinely have buses on the road, branded buses, so the idea that