Sturgeon appeared at the Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye, in Powys, in conversation with journalist Francine Stock to promote her 2025 memoir, Frankly.<\/p>\n
She told the audience that Salmond, who later expressed reservations about the couple’s professional roles, had appointed Murrell in 2000.<\/p>\n
And the ex-MSP said her estranged husband’s offending, which started in 2010, pre-dated her election as party leader.<\/p>\n
Sturgeon said: “My judgement was that the chief executive was not line-manged by the party leader. There is a national executive committee.<\/p>\n
“My judgement was that it was not fair for him to lose his job, that he had done well, because I was taking on a new job.<\/p>\n
“If I could turn back the clock, of course, I would take a different decision.”<\/p>\n
The former first minister said she took responsibility for keeping Murrell in his post but added: “I still don’t think that makes me responsible for somebody committing a crime.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sturgeon appeared at the Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye, in Powys, in conversation with journalist Francine Stock to promote…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":610874,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-610873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610873\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/610874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}