Why I’m relishing the downfall of Nasty Nicola

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.

People used to call Mrs Thatcher ‘bossy’. But she just felt strongly about things – and she had a sense of humour about her dominant personality. ‘I’ve only got time to lose my temper and get my way!’, she is reputed to have said on walking into an EU meeting. When one looks at Sturgeon, the word is difficult to avoid, even if one is a rad-fem like myself. And to make it worse, she seems utterly humourless. The only vision she ever had was tunnel vision; she seemed to exist as a politician only to stop people doing things they wanted to do, and then to make their lives worse, while insisting that she’s making them better.

The Scottish people voted to stay in the United Kingdom; she demanded another referendum. The British people voted to leave the EU; she wanted to rejoin. She posed as a public-health crusader, advocating for strict lockdown, masking and vaccine passports; Scottish death rates for the Delta and Omicron variants of Covid-19 rose above those of England. More die of drug overdoses in Scotland than in any other European country, percentage-wise. By 2019, this figure had doubled from 2014, the year she came to power. More homeless people die on the street in Scotland than in any other country in the Union. She has no children, yet sought to impose a state guardian on every child in Scotland from before their birth until the age of 18; thankfully, her Named Person scheme was struck down by the UK Supreme Court. 

She once claimed to be ‘a feminist to my fingertips’ and vowed she ‘would never support anything that I thought was an erosion of women’s rights’. But under her rule, the Hate Crime Act effectively shut down debate over whether men in frocks should be allowed to ruin everything women have, from sports trophies to toilets. Until the Isla Bryson case came to public notice, rapists were sent to female prisons if they had spent a mere six months ‘living as woman’ – this statement was even sillier in Scotland than in England, where the national dress for men is the kilt and thus men in skirts are everywhere.

Of course, Sturgeon would find such a comment ‘simplified and lurid’ – the phrase she used when asked to define what a woman is. She was accused of shutting down debate about self-anointed gender-recognition after saying, ‘We should focus on the real threats to women, not the threats that, while I appreciate that some of these views are very sincerely held, in my view, are not valid’. Ideas being ‘not valid’ often lead to the people who hold them being cast as non-people, and therefore perfectly okay to persecute.

Religion in Scotland always ran deeper than it did in England. Under the reign of Witchfinder Sturgeon, the woke trials were in full swing for many years. Sturgeon conducted them in an oddly bloodless way; she was the Joan of Arc of admin, who never saw a pint pot she didn’t want to penalise for not being metric. The only time she showed herself as truly human was when she was caught on camera celebrating Jo Swinson losing her seat.

Sturgeon’s resignation speech in 2023 seemed as Uncanny Valley as the rest of her output, with ‘burnout’ and the funeral of Scots independence activist Allan Angus cited, as well as tranny-related embarrassment. I never bought it; she’d been a tireless political zealot since she was a youngster in CND – and now, all of a sudden, she needed a wee rest, and ‘spend more time with her niece and nephews’? This seemed extra unlikely coming just weeks after she told the BBC that she still had ‘plenty in the tank’.

Something didn’t add up – and I don’t just mean that missing £400,000 that went astray from the SNP coffers. There had also been mounting curiosity about the loan of more than £100,000 given to the SNP by – yes! – Peter ‘I’m the man with the money’ Murrell in 2021 to help it out with ‘cash flow’ issues. (He must have flogged a few salt cellars?) ‘Robbing Peter to pay Paul’ takes on a whole new meaning here, with Robbing Peter being far from the innocent party.

Historically, the Scots are an admirable people. But when JM Barrie opined of his compatriots that ‘There are few more impressive sights than a Scotsman on the make’, I doubt whether he had splashing so much moolah that you make a pre-prison P Diddy look self-denying in mind. Once the chuckles have abated (and it will take quite a long time, as this is the funniest political scandal I can recall in my entire lifetime), perhaps the best thing about this whole glorious mess is that brave and gifted Scots politicians who came to grief under Sturgeon’s rule may come to the fore again, now that the stranglehold of the McMafia has been unravelled.

However this plays out, her reputation is ruined. As the hundreds of revellers in George Square put it as they reacted to her resignation with drinking and dancing: ‘Conga, conga, conga, Nicola’s no longer!’

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Follow her Substack, ‘Notes from the Naughty Step’, here.