For nearly a decade, Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell were Scotland’s ultimate political power couple.
As a household, they wielded immense power: one half of it, Sturgeon, holding the office of First Minister from 2014 to 2023.
The other, Murrell, at the reins of Scotland’s ruling party for more than two decades as SNP chief executive between 1999 and 2023. In the end, they resigned from their respective roles just nine days apart in March 2023 – an omen, it turned out, of the storm clouds brewing for the Nationalists.
Sturgeon was just 18 years old when she met Murrell, six years her senior, at an SNP youth event in 1988. In 1999, the future First Minister became an MSP in the newly reconvened Scottish Parliament – in the same year Murrell was appointed to the powerful position of SNP chief exec.
By 2003, Sturgeon and Murrell had announced they were an item and were living together in Uddingston, near Glasgow. Seven years later, in July 2010, the pair wed at a civil ceremony in Oran Mor in Glasgow’s west end.
Either side of these nuptials were seismic election victories that cemented the SNP in power – first, winning minority government in 2007, followed by the party’s unprecedented 2011 majority. The SNP, with Alex Salmond in charge, Sturgeon as his deputy and Murrell working behind the scenes, was an election-winning machine.
So came the 2014 independence referendum and the aftermath of defeat for Yes – the resignation of Salmond and elevation of Sturgeon. What’s now clear, however, is not everyone in the party was happy with so much power being concentrated in the Sturgeon-Murrell household – including Salmond himself.
The late former first minister, who died of a heart attack in North Macedonia last year, spoke just weeks before his death about that period. In an interview leading up to the tenth anniversary of the IndyRef, Salmond revealed he tried to persuade Sturgeon to remove Murrell from his position as Nats CEO.
Salmond said: “After I stood down as leader, I thought it was my job to tell Nicola first and then Peter. I thought the combination between her being the first minister and Peter being the chief executive was going to cause great difficulty.
“Not necessarily when things were going well – but as soon as things went badly, it was going to be a relationship which the press would exploit.”
He added: “Nicola said she didn’t think it was a problem. And Peter looked at me with a look of sort of hurt astonishment, resentment, more than anything else.
“But it was advice well meant. It seemed to me a patently obvious point. I think my estrangement from Nicola and Peter can be traced to that moment.”
Speaking on the same documentary, Sturgeon defended her stance, saying: “Peter had done the job as chief executive way before I became first minister. I think if the gender roles have been reversed, and the ideal woman had to step down from their job because of their spouse’s role, that would have looked odd.”
As Sturgeon took over as First Minister and SNP leader, the party soared in the polls and wiped out Labour in the 2015 general election, then won two more Holyrood elections in 2016 and 2021. She proved happy to make aspects of her marriage to Murrell public, with the couple pictured together at home, at polling stations, at the Wimbledon tennis tournament and at a film premiere to name a few.
In private, however, Sturgeon and Murrell suffered an awful heartache back in 2011, losing a baby to miscarriage. It wasn’t until 2016 that Sturgeon made the information public, saying she did so to challenge judgments made about women who don’t have children, particularly those in politics.
Sturgeon told a magazine in 2016: “There are many reasons why women don’t have children. Some of us simply don’t want to, some of us worry about the impact on our career – and there is still so much to do, through better childcare, more progressive working practices and more enlightened attitudes, to make sure we don’t feel we have to choose.
“And sometimes, for whatever reason, having a baby just doesn’t happen – no matter how much we might want it to.” She later thanked the public both on her and Murrell’s behalf for the messages of support they received following the revelations.
In the political world, friction between Sturgeon and her predecessor Salmond blew up into a scandal that upended Scottish politics. Salmond defeated the Sturgeon-led Scottish Government in civil court in 2019 and was awarded £500,000 in damages after judges concluded a harassment probe into his conduct in office was unfair, unlawful and tainted by apparent bias.
A year later, Salmond was cleared separately of criminal charges of sexual assault at the High Court in Edinburgh. Later, in astonishing evidence to a Holyrood inquiry into the saga, Salmond explicitly implicated Murrell in what he claimed was an SNP insider plot to bring him down.
In the grand scheme of things, the event that caused Murrell to resign in March 2023 – a row over misleadingly inflated party membership figures – seems rather trivial now. It came after Sturgeon announced she was standing down as SNP leader and First Minister in February 2023, eventually leaving office on March 28.
During the ensuing leadership election the party was urged to reveal its membership figures. When Record sister paper the Sunday Mail reported that the numbers were down by 30,000, this was rubbished by party media chief Murray Foote.
But it was true – and Murrell took the fall for it, resigning on March 19. Much worse was to come for the couple, however.
A long-running investigation into the SNP’s finances had been ongoing since 2021. In April 2023, it became shockingly real for the couple with their Uddingston home raided by cops and Murrell arrested.
Sturgeon, too, was arrested in June although released without charge. She has always denied any wrongdoing.
The murky case has also seen a high-end motorhome seized by police from Murrell’s mother’s home in Dunfermline. Last April, Murrell was charged with embezzlement of funds from the SNP. The investigation is still ongoing.
The news of Sturgeon and Murrell’s separation comes as little surprise to observers, with joint public appearances by the couple evaporating since the investigation – known as Operation Branchform – went public.
The legacy of Scotland’s once supreme power couple now seems uncertain at best.
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