Five key takeaways from Nicola Sturgeon's BBC Laura Kuenssberg interview

Nicola Sturgeon has taken part in her first media interview since Peter Murrell pled guilty to embezzling SNP funds.

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The former first minister spoke to BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg in an interview broadcast on Sunday morning.

She answered lots of questions over an interview which took the best part of an hour.

But what did she have to say at the end of a week in which her estranged husband was put behind bars?

‘I didn’t stop complaints about finances’

The former SNP leader said that she did not stop people from alerting the party about its finances - despite National Executive Committee members and the party treasurer resigning because they had been denied full access to the accounts.

Ms Sturgeon said: “I reject completely the notion that people were trying to alert the party to the kind of behaviour that Peter pled guilty to on Monday.”

She said: “Until probably early 2023, there was no suggestion that what was being looked into in terms of the finances was potential embezzlement. The issue that was being looked into was whether the £600,000 that had been raised to fund a second independent referendum had been used for election campaigning.

She added: “The idea that I tried to stop them is not true.”

Campervan

Ms Sturgeon said she did not have “any conscious memory” of seeing an expensive motorhome outside her mother-in-laws house.

The campervan was seized from Mr Murrell’s mother’s house in Dunfermline and was one of the items listed that he embezzled.

Ms Sturgeon said the motorhome would not have been “immediately visible” because it was at the side of the house.

She added that if she had seen it , “I probably owuld have assumed it was a neighbour’s”.

Suspicions raised early 2023

Ms Sturgeon said she first began to suspect there had been wrongdoing by Mr Murrell in “early 2023”.

She resigned as SNP leader and first minister in February 2023 and had previously said the police investigation played no part in her standing down.

Ms Sturgeon said: “It became clear that some people who were being interviewed by the police were being asked not just about this issue of, you know, referendum funding used for election campaigns, but there were questions being asked about the purchase of individual items.”

‘Nothing that belongs to me’ should reimburse members

As the money had been embezzled from SNP members, Ms Sturgeon was asked if she would “contribute in some way”.

The former first minister was visibly annoyed by the question and asked what the interviewer meant.

She then said that there will be “a legal process to recover the money from Peter that he embezzled from the SNP”.

She added: “I am not guilty of that embezzlement, so nothing that belongs to me should be part of that, rightly, it should not be part of that.

‘I am not a victim’

When asked if she was a victim, Ms Sturgeon said: “I’m a working class girl from the West of Scotland, I don’t like victim terminology, I will never think of myself as a victim. The SNP’s the victim in this crime.”

But she then suggested that she was a victim because she said: “I’m out here feeling as if I’m serving a sentence for a crime I did not commit.”