A decade ago, Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell invited television cameras into their home to show the nation how normal power couples live.
Yet, if the aim of the exercise was to make them seem more human through the eyes of Good Morning Britain interviewer Susanna Reid then it was hardly a roaring success.
The kitchen of the four-bedroom property was pristine with only the very expensive £1,400 coffee machine looking like it got any regular use.
As she wandered round, Good Morning Britain interviewer Susanna Reid was struck by the near-clinical levels of cleanliness. It was, she opined, ‘immaculate… like a show home’.
Far from humanising them, the lasting impression was they were a bit of an odd couple. That their lives away from politics were as blank as the walls of the non-descript box they shared together.
But then, of course, politics was their life and there was something equally clinical about the way they held both party and country in their thrall for so long.
And then, it all fell apart. First, their grip on political power loosened in 2023 as the SNP was engulfed in a major police investigation, and now – apparently to no-one’s great surprise – their marriage has also collapsed.
It now appears the marriage was floundering for some time. The pair have not been spotted in public together in months.
Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell began their relationship in 2003 and were married at a civil ceremony in Glasgow’s west end in 2010
The former Scottish first minister revealed the news via a post on her Instagram account
Ms Sturgeon, 54, and Mr Murrell, 60, ruled at the top of the SNP and Scottish politics for many years before she stood down as first minister and party leader in March 2023. Pictured: The couple at St Paul’s Cathedral, London, in 2022
Mr Murrell, who was charged with embezzling SNP funds in April as part of Operation Branchform’s investigation into the party’s finances, is rarely seen around these days.
Recently, Ms Sturgeon, who was arrested and released without charge in June 2023 and insists she has done nothing wrong, has frequently posted pictures of herself on Instagram partying with a close group of female friends, including the crime writer Val McDermid.
She chose the same social media account to post news that her marriage was ending. It was a decision taken jointly, she says, and ‘with a heavy heart’.
It will have been a wrench given they have known each other for almost four decades since they first met in 1988 at an SNP youth weekend which Mr Murrell helped organise.
Back then, the Edinburgh-born party worker was ensconced in Alex Salmond’s constituency office in Peterhead while Miss Sturgeon, fresh from school in Dreghorn, Ayrshire, was a teenage firebrand.
Little about this geeky party backroom boy – six years her senior – appeared to push any romantic buttons for her.
At youth camp and, thereafter, at intermittent encounters at party conferences, she remembered him as ‘Mr Gadget Man’.
‘He wore a belt with all his gizmos on it, including a very early Psion organiser,’ Miss Sturgeon later recalled. ‘I was transfixed. How can anybody walk about with that attached to his belt?’
Owing to his nerdish persona, he was for a time nicknamed Penfold in party circles – after the bookish, bespectacled sidekick of cartoon character Danger Mouse.
Mr Murrell jokes around with Ms Sturgeon after voting in the 2022 election
Ms Sturgeon, pictured with Mr Murrell in 2017, previously denied her marriage was on the rocks amid the strain of the police investigation into the SNP’s finances
For his part, he once recalled: ‘One of my first memories of Nicola is when she appeared on a Grampian Television programme. She must have been about 18. I remember being impressed by her political skills, even at that early stage.
‘The funny thing is, I’d probably organised it. I was working for Alex Salmond in his Banff and Buchan constituency and the request probably came into our office in Peterhead, but I don’t remember recommending her.’
And yet, by 2003 the pair were an item. Ms Sturgeon had single-mindedly pursued Nationalist politics since gaining her law degree from Glasgow University and would end up married to the job.
At the 2003 Holyrood election campaign, Mr Murrell was the party’s chief executive and was in daily contact with Miss Sturgeon during her bid to be re-elected as an MSP.
After the election, the need to be in constant touch was no longer there, but Miss Sturgeon recalled: ‘That’s when I thought, well, I want to be in constant communication. It was the point we both realised there might be something else.’
Their respective partners were dropped and they embarked on a relationship which, for a time, they were intent on keeping secret. It became common knowledge after the SNP spring conference of 2004, but not until the Salmond/ Sturgeon leadership bid was launched that autumn did its full implications emerge.
The SNP’s marriage of leaders, many in the party believed, blurred the dividing line between the affairs of party and the affairs of government.
‘It’s like a cabal at the top of the party,’ complained one source bitterly. Neither Miss Sturgeon nor Mr Murrell saw it as a problem and he remained in post and she moved upwards, first to deputy and later to leader and First Minister.
Police were seen scouring Ms Sturgeon and Mr Murrell’s garden during their two-day search of the property
In April 2023, police spent two days scouring the Glasgow home of Ms Sturgeon and Mr Murrell
If Mr Salmond was uncomfortable with the arrangement as leader and later First Minister, he did not say publicly. He would have plenty to say about it once his protégée succeeded him and he quit the party following accusations of sexual assault for which he stood trial and was acquitted.
In his view, Mr Murrell should have stood down as SNP chief executive as soon as his wife became First Minister in 2014.
The pair had married four years before that in a quiet ceremony at Glasgow’s Oran Mor, days before her 40th birthday.
By then, the pair had purchased the £228,000 detached home on a suburban estate in Glasgow’s eastern outskirts which so fascinated Miss Reid.
Within months of the wedding Miss Sturgeon was pregnant, but later miscarried – a private heartache in her marriage that was not revealed until well into her time as First Minister.
They became the model of a middle-aged, workaholic couple with no children for whom nights out on the town were never their thing, preferring Indian takeaways and TV at home.
‘The fact that we are on first name terms with the person who delivers it on Friday night shouldn’t allow you to read anything into my lifestyle,’ joked Miss Sturgeon to presenter Miss Reid during that famous ‘at home’ interview.
The then First Minister also let slip that she ironed her husband’s shirts on a Sunday night, because ‘that kind of gets me off the hook of any other domestic tasks because, in my head, that’s me, I have pulled my weight in the house with the domestic chores.’ She added rather sheepishly: ‘I’ve never been very good in the kitchen.’
What she could always do was point to the impressive triumphs she and her husband secured during her quarter century as an elected politician.
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She led a party that won 53 out of the 56 seats it contested in the 2015 General Election. That same year her approval ratings reached 71 per cent, higher than any other western leader, and she performed so surefootedly in the televised leaders’ debates that many English viewers Googled ‘can I vote for the SNP?’
Yet there would be precious few other peeks at married life behind their front door over the years – small wonder, perhaps, given Miss Sturgeon has previously hinted that her conversations with Mr Murrell would be a cure for any eavesdropper’s insomnia.
She recalled waking up at around 3am in 2014 and finding her husband sitting up in bed, absorbed in his iPhone. He was checking up on the latest SNP membership figures which had surged in the days following the independence referendum.
‘Bada bing bada boom, 25,000 newbies and counting,’ he tweeted on September 23. ‘Shaka Laka Boom!!’ was his update on Twitter the following day, as another 9,000 arrived.
It was, of course, the plummeting membership figures and Mr Murrell’s role in putting out misleading information about them which resulted in him quitting his role in disgrace two years ago.
But collateral damage from the fact that the party’s leader and chief executive shared a bedroom had been building up for years prior to that point. As the heat was turned up on Mr Salmond over sexual harassment claims, he arrived at his successor’s home in 2018 to discuss his predicament and, quite naturally, found Mr Murrell sitting in the living room.
The meeting with Ms Sturgeon was fraught. It was the day her mentor admitted to her that he had indeed behaved improperly towards a female worker in Bute House and had apologised for it. The news devastated her.
And yet, as the Salmond inquiry later heard in December 2020, Mr Murrell said he did not know what the meeting was about.
He said: ‘When you are married to the First Minister, who is privy to lots of information, when she says she can’t talk about something you don’t continue to say “ah, but”. It just doesn’t happen.
She’s been a minister for a long time and works very hard, every day and every weekend – when we get precious time together, the last thing we want to be doing is rerunning days with each other.’
It was a very different characterisation of life behind closed doors from the one Ms Sturgeon had given a few years earlier.
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Then, she said: ‘Being in the same kind of line of work has its upsides and its downsides. The upside is that Peter understands what is going on and why I’m late home all the time.
‘The downside is that you just end up talking about it all the time and you never leave it outside.’
Their home, where such conversations may or may not have taken place, would once become the focus for television cameras in 2023 after dozens of police and forensics officers arrived at 7.35am one early April morning as part of Police Scotland’s Operation Branchform.
That came just three weeks after Mr Murrell relinquished his role as the SNP chief executive, just days before Ms Sturgeon left office as First Minister.
After striving to achieve their stated aim of independence, any sense of achievement she and her husband might have felt has been obliterated by the wreckage of their legacy in power.
And having split from office, the pair have now split from each other.
Ms Sturgeon pointed out in her message: ‘To all intents and purposes we have been separated for some time now and feel it is time to bring others up to speed with where we are.
‘It goes without saying that we still care deeply for each other, and always will.’
The tone of the briefing suggests there will be little argument over the division of their assets – even the family home may become a straightforward financial transaction.
Besides, with prosecutors still considering their position, there may be more pressing legal matters waiting down the line.
Divorce may well prove the easy bit.