Scotland’s former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has described her arrest by police investigating the SNP’s finances as the worst day of her life.
Sturgeon describes being questioned by detectives as part of Operation Branchform in an extract from her upcoming memoir.
Sturgeon also writes about her “utter disbelief” about police raiding the home she shared with her husband Peter Murrell in April 2023.
Elsewhere in the extracts, the former SNP leader describes the pain of suffering a miscarriage and sets out her views on sexuality, which she says she does not consider “to be binary”.
Sturgeon writes that she was in bed when her husband answered the door to police officers around 07:00 on 5 April 2023. “It was with a sense of utter disbelief that I realised the police were in my home, that they had a warrant to arrest my husband and search the house,” she writes. I was in despair, struggling to comprehend what had happened.”
Sturgeon was arrested in June 2023. She was told in March this year that she would face no further action and was no longer a suspect.
Her husband, the former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, was charged with embezzlement in April 2024.
The couple announced they were separating earlier this year.
Sturgeon said that during the period between the raid on their home in April 2023 and her arrest she felt like she “had fallen into the plot of a dystopian novel.”
When she was arrested, she was: “Horrified and devastated, though also relieved in a strange sort of way. At least the ordeal of waiting was over.
“Sunday, June 11, was the worst day of my life. Being arrested and questioned by the police is an experience I’m not sure I will ever get over.
“When I eventually left the police station, late that afternoon, I was in a bad state mentally. I went to a friend’s house in the northeast of Scotland and stayed for a week.”
She said the day when she was informed that no action would be taken against her, a day on which Mr Murrell appeared again in court, was “a day of deeply mixed emotions.”
“The feeling of relief, and release, was overwhelming,” she writes.
