I must say that I hugged myself with glee when I heard that Nicola Sturgeon’s husband of 15 years, Peter Murrell, had been caught sitting on a bumper haul of luxury goods that made Aladdin’s cave look like a food bank.
Imagine the tongue-lashings he’ll be getting! Tracey Ullman’s brilliant parody of Sturgeon as a cruel Bond villain torturing innocent Scots celebrities for not being Scottish enough has never come more to mind. There is a distinct ‘You won’t like me when I’m angry’ feeling about her; if the walls of the Murrell dwelling could talk, what colourful Gaelic wrath might they reveal? I wonder if poor Peter might have been accused of being a ‘bampot’ or a ‘bawbag’ and even informed that ‘Yer bum’s oot the windae’?
Sturgeon’s lawyer has snootily implied that such frivolous things as shopping sprees are beneath the former first minister: ‘There appears to be an assumption that as FM, when Mr Murrell was busy buying multiple pens or pepper pots etc, she was with him. Ms Sturgeon was not, as unsurprisingly she was busy with other matters.’
I’m not totally convinced. She’s always been ready to stick that sharp little nose of hers into everybody’s business. If there’s one thing Sturgeon isn’t, it’s hands-off. Think of her Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, which came into force on April 1 2024, prompting JK Rowling to write on X: ‘If you genuinely imagine I’d delete posts calling a man a man, so as not to be prosecuted under this ludicrous law, stand by for the mother of all April Fools’ jokes.’ You can’t imagine Sturgeon saying, ‘You do you, hun!’, to a husband, no matter how long they were asunder (they separated in 2025 and his ‘hobby’ started in 2010). If someone presents themselves as being efficient to the point of being a pocket calculator with a pixie cut, it’s hard to accept them as a ditsy broad who doesn’t notice that her husband is apparently attempting to set up a Caledonian branch of Harrods.
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