The Nicola Sturgeon Show must go on

While former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell sits in custody, waiting for sentencing for illegally using party funds to pay for a motorhome, telescope, salt and pepper mills worth £2,618 and a Pac-Man video game, where is ex-wife Nicola Sturgeon? Bravely or shamelessly, depending on how you see it, she is on the road promoting her biography.

The former first minister will go ahead with an appearance at a literary event in Ireland this week to promote her memoir Frankly just three days after her ex pleaded guilty at the High Court in Edinburgh to embezzling £400,310.65 from the SNP under her leadership.

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Rats in a Sack

Sturgeon, who led the SNP from November 2014 to April 2023, is speaking at the Listowel Writers’ Week Literary Festival in County Kerry on Thursday, where she will be interviewed by the Scottish writer Andrew O’Hagan. The information in the programme about the event states that she will be discussing “Leadership, Resilience and Finding Your Voice”

“With candour, insight and warmth, she shares personal achievements and regrets, discusses the challenges of being a woman in a high-stakes political arena, and reveals the person behind the public figure,” it says.

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Rats in a Sack

Sturgeon only devotes six pages of Frankly to her own arrest and the subsequent announcement she would face no charges – although, to be fair, the fact Murrell’s own case was still active would have limited her legally.

But John Swinney, her successor-but-one, while saying he believed Sturgeon knew nothing about her then husband’s crimes, did struggle to say whether he would have questioned his own spouse had cars, a luxury coffee machine, a 1:30 scale model helicopter and a £1,475 Beatles fountain pen all turned up at his home. Pushed on Monday, Swinney would only say: “These issues are the issues that have happened.”

But the big question – after where on earth one finds salt and pepper mills costing £2,618 – is: why did Swinney use £22.04 of embezzled SNP cash to buy a copy of the book Women Hold Up Half The Sky? Surely he might have expected a signed copy for free from its author – one N. Sturgeon?