SNP chief bought Sturgeon necklace with embezzled party cash

A necklace bought for Nicola Sturgeon in a Shetland jewellery shop has been pulled into the centre of Peter Murrell’s embezzlement case, turning a personal purchase into a public marker of how deeply trust collapsed inside the SNP.

Murrell visited Shetland Jewellery on 28 July 2019 during the party’s by-election campaign and told owner Kenneth Rae, while Sturgeon was in the workshop area, that he was “the man with the money” and said, “I need to buy something.” He chose a 9ct gold pendant called the Mirrie Dancer Drongs, a design inspired by the Northern Lights and the sea stacks off Hillswick.

Rae said the necklace cost about £850 at the time, although court documents later listed the item next to a figure of £425. Sturgeon was photographed wearing the pendant on several occasions, and Rae said she wore it quite often, including in the Scottish Parliament chamber.

Seven years after that shop visit, the pendant was identified as one of hundreds of items Murrell admitted purchasing with cash he stole from the party. At the High Court in Edinburgh, the 61-year-old admitted embezzling more than £400,000 from the Scottish National Party between August 2010 and October 2022 and pleaded guilty to buying luxury goods, jewellery, cosmetics, two cars and a motorhome.

The case has sharpened scrutiny of a leadership circle that spent years projecting discipline and control while the party itself was under strain. The SNP spent £98,958 on its unsuccessful bid in the 2019 Shetland by-election, an election the Liberal Democrats won with a spend of £64,534, and the later revelations over party money have given new weight to questions about how the organisation was managed at the top.

Sturgeon said she had been “deceived and let down by a husband she loved and trusted” and said she had “no reason to doubt” he was spending his own money because the couple earned high salaries, rarely socialised and rarely went on holidays. Police Scotland later sent officers to Shetland to take a statement from Rae as part of its investigation into alleged SNP financial wrongdoing.

What began as a necklace from a local jeweller in Weisdale has become another stark image of the party’s long period of turmoil, with personal conduct now inseparable from the wider question of power, money and accountability inside Scotland’s governing nationalist movement.