They should make a film about Peter Murrell, shouldn’t they? Starring, possibly, Leonardo DiCaprio. Nicola Sturgeon’s ex-husband is not only a crook of shameless proportions, but for a decade or so, he somehow spent like a sailor on shore leave without anyone around him raising so much as an eyebrow. Not for him the discreet Swiss bank account or the mattress stuffed with bearer-bonds. Tom Ripley, Frank Abagnale Jr, Macavity the Mystery Cat: these figures are cautious amateurs by comparison. Is he a hypnotist?
Is there a point at which incuriosity becomes a superpower?
As Sturgeon admitted to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg in her first interview after Murrell pleaded guilty to half-inching nearly half a million quid from the Scottish National Party, were she an ordinary member of the public, on the outside looking in at the scandal that has tanked her marriage and her political career, “How could she not have known?” is exactly the question she would have been asking.
Well, quite. And yet, she tells us that she really didn’t know. Not a thing. “We were both on high salaries,” she said more than once. Peter Murrell had a separate bank account to which she didn’t have access, she reminded us. And she was working jolly hard as First Minister of Scotland, too, so she wasn’t keeping a close eye on the appearance of… all this stuff.
A brand-new Jaguar here, a VW Golf there; a brace of fancy coffee-machines here; a £2,600 pepper-grinder there; multiple iPads, five Nintendo consoles, an Xbox and a PlayStation just for good measure. There was even a mobile home – a bloody great luxury caravan – but, Sturgeon says, she didn’t notice that because he’d parked it round the side of his mum’s house. Even as her home started to resemble the conveyor belt of prizes on The Generation Game, Sturgeon tells us, her curiosity was not so much as piqued.
Is there a point at which incuriosity becomes a superpower? Here was a woman with a rat all but sellotaped to her top lip, yet whose sense of smell registered nothing but petunias. That is what she tells us, and the charitable among us must believe her. But we’re entitled, I think, to feel that a person so oblivious as to what things cost and so incurious about her surroundings might not have been the ideal person to be allowed to cross a B-road unsupervised, much less serve as First Minister of Scotland.
I think we’re entitled, too, to feel a little bit queasy at Ms Sturgeon’s line that she’s not mounting this defence just for herself, but in solidarity with wronged women everywhere: “For my own sake, but 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.” Her track record on sticking up for other women – I’m thinking of her floundering U-turn over gender self-ID only once a male rapist was committed to a woman’s prison – has been patchy at best.
And it was self-pity rather than principle that seemed to animate her other remarks. “I’m out here feeling as if I’m serving a sentence for a crime I did not commit,” she said; said sentence not being, literally, a jail sentence, but simply a degree of sceptical scrutiny that she’s finding uncomfortable and yet which she concedes is only natural.
She has also complained: “My picture has been on more front pages in Scotland this week than my former husband’s has, and I don’t think that’s right.”
Well, it does go a bit with the territory. She is a former First Minister for Scotland who turned out to be married to a serious criminal, to have benefitted unwittingly from the proceeds of his crime, and, what’s more, to have been the leader of the political party he was busy robbing blind. The press will tend to take an interest.
If, as she says, she really didn’t have the first idea what was going on in the party she was in charge of, or the home she shared with her husband, or in the mind of that husband, she does deserve a certain amount of pity. But she also deserves a certain amount of contempt. Saying that Murrell “perpetrated a crime on the SNP – by definition, that included me as the party leader” seems to suggest that, as party leader and the person ultimately responsible for the party’s procedures and standards, she’s no less a victim than the ordinary SNP supporters whose donations ended up paying for her fancy coffee machine. I don’t think that will quite fly.
It must have been horrid being investigated by the police, and I bet she’s glad it’s over. It will have been horrid, too, to discover that her husband wasn’t in any respect the man she thought he was. But something else that won’t quite fly is her claim to have been “completely cleared and exonerated” by that investigation. If we’re going to split hairs about it, and why not, “completely exonerated” and “not charged” aren’t exactly the same things.
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