How did Nicola Sturgeon not notice her husband’s crimes against good taste?

By his own admission, Peter Murrell, the former chief executive of the Scottish National Party, embezzled £400,310.65 from party funds between August 2010 and October 2022.

I love the precision of the sum determined by Police Scotland, and can only wonder, given its size, how all the SNP’s auditors and finance people and oversight committees could fail to have worked out where their party members’ money – for it was theirs – ended up.

Even more mysterious is why the woman not known as Mrs Murrell – Nicola Sturgeon – wasn’t more curious about her husband’s largesse and the vast number of luxury items he was presumably amassing in their home.

Take the giant camper van, for starters. As a sometime car reviewer, I’m familiar with these vehicles. Fine pieces of machinery, engineered by the likes of Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen. I’ve even been on holiday in one. Amazingly comfortable for something the size of a commercial van.

But not the Murrell-Sturgeon wagon, which was so vast, it couldn’t be easily parked (or, to be unkind, hidden), so the rather exclusive £125,000 Niesmann+Bischoff house-on-wheels was left at the Dunfermline home of his elderly mother, Margaret Murrell. By all accounts, it rarely moved.

The explanation at the time was that it was supposed to be an SNP battle bus, for the supposedly imminent second independence referendum; a tale Sturgeon might reasonably have been taken in by. But then again, why was it never painted up in yellow SNP livery with some slogan about sending money to Westminster posted on the side and used for other campaigning? Why was it just mothballed?

Murrell reminds me of a high-class version of one of those compulsive shoppers who go on sprees, or send away for things, all on credit… and then never open the bags, leaving them to pile high in their homes, building a monument to tat and their own mental health issues.

Of course, Murrell was different because he was using other people’s money, and his spending patterns had a definite edge of conspicuous consumption about them – more Vogue than the Freemans catalogue. It seems he liked to show off, as when he strode into the jewellers in Shetland and came out with a nine-carat gold necklace featuring a “Mirrie Dancer Drongs" design, costing a relatively modest £850 and worn by Sturgeon in Holyrood. If only the parliamentarians knew who had paid for that nice wee piece.

Expensive gadgets for making posh coffee seem to be another of Murrell’s weaknesses. He managed to amass several bean-to-cup coffee machines – a Miele CM6300 (£1,299); one by Jura (£1,865.87), later upgraded to the Jura Z8 (£2,595) – as well as a manual espresso maker (£141.07); five packs of gourmet Portuguese coffee beans (£84.95) plus five packs of roasted beans (£123.91); a Jura coffee-cup warmer, plus six Jura espresso cups and a stainless steel milk pipe (£660.80); and, naturally, an assortment of Le Creuset espresso and cappuccino mugs (£354.70).

Murrell’s inventory of shame has much, much more of this nonsense. No cost of living crisis chez Sturgeon, eh?

But where did all this gear live? No one domestic kitchen was big enough to hold such a display of coffee technology. Were they planning to open a cafe to celebrate independence, or to retrain as baristas?

And, more to the point, how much espresso could Murrell and Sturgeon reasonably drink? Sadly, the recorded purchase of one large jar of Nescafe Gold Blend suggests that, in the end, Peter gave up on the whole upmarket coffee thing. It’s just the sort of expensive fixation that a husband and wife could row about.

The same could be said about fountain pens. He managed to spend £1,407 on two Montblancs, bought a solid titanium Starwalker World Time (£4,225), and a special edition Beatles pen in 14-carat gold costing £700. And if that’s not big enough a luxury blowout, then there’s the £9,350 spent on two Bremont watches, all of the gaming kit (which seems a bit “young” for him), and the £57,000 on a brand new Jaguar…

Sturgeon says she had “no knowledge or suspicion whatsoever that he was using SNP funds for personal purposes”, and is“utterly appalled” by his actions, pointing out that “I was fully cleared after a thorough investigation”, adding that it “underlines that these are not my crimes. I was misled, just as others were.”

Fair enough – but the questions still hang in the air. As his wife and, as party leader, his employer, Sturgeon would have known what his salary was (about £100,000 a year) and would have an idea about his finances. So – speculating here – either she was so engrossed in her job that she didn’t notice the avalanche of consumer spending engulfing the family home… or she just assumed he’d paid for it somehow on credit or they were freebies.

When questions were asked within the party about missing funds, she seems not to have pursued them energetically, or at least not sufficiently to link them to her husband, the chief executive with a growing collection of luxury gadgets and pricey nick-nacks (such as the Royal Mint Scottish silver unicorn coin, £795).

Despite the Sherlock Holmes folio edition that Murrell presented to Sturgeon, it didn’t give her much inspiration to solve the crimes happening in her own party, or her own home.

Even now, there is some £60,000 unaccounted for. I reckon there could be a few more lightly used coffee percolators stashed away somewhere.

I’m hoping Police Scotland auctions this stuff off. I quite fancy a newish fountain pen (one careless owner).