How the hell didn't Nicola Sturgeon know about her estranged husband embezzlement scandal?

All terribly dramatic. The only problem is no one has ever asked her to take responsibility for the fact her estranged husband, Peter Murrell, embezzled £400,000 from SNP party funds.

All everyone’s been asking is how the hell was she blind, deaf and dumb to everything he did?

How didn’t she see the smorgasbord of goodies her husband was buying? How didn’t she find out about the £124,000 luxury motor home or the £80,000 Jag, and say, “Pete, how can we afford that?"

Her pathetic excuse for never seeing the £3,000 coffee machine was: “ I never used our kitchen.”

Seriously? We know she has because there’s a film clip doing the rounds of the two of them having breakfast in it and her chastising him for not being able to work the toaster properly.

She bleated about how wives shouldn’t be made to take the rap for their husband’s crimes and that’s what she felt was happening to her: “I feel as if I’m serving a sentence for a crime I didn’t commit,“ she said with her lower lip trembling.

“For my own sake but for the sake of people out there, a lot of women end up being blamed for the actions of men in their lives.

"I’m not going to contribute to that kind of sense that I’m responsible for someone else’s crimes.”

Oh, pass the sick bag! Sturgeon knows full well no one is blaming her for Murrell committing or supporting those crimes.

What we’re asking is how the hell she didn’t see or realise he was committing them.

But who’d have thought it – Nicola Sturgeon, one of the sharpest, most astute women in politics, playing the role “the Wronged Little Woman” to perfection

But no one was buying that either because for nine years as leader of the SNP this woman spewed out fire and brimstone.

She was strong, she was passionate and she was consumed by her dream of an independent Scotland.

Yes, she was small in stature, but she took down men twice her size on a daily basis if they stood in her way. Hell, she even married one three times her size. Nothing scared or daunted her.

So, this picture she’s trying to paint of her as the little wife just isn’t washing with the Scottish people – or anyone else for that matter.

Anyone who ever saw her and Murrell together – apart from thinking they were the oddest couple on the planet – could see from the off that she was very much the boss.

No question about it. She micromanaged her husband in exactly the same way she micromanaged Scotland.

And she did both with an iron fist. So, the idea that suddenly she’s the helpless victim in all this is hard to swallow.

She was First Minister, party leader and one of three signatories required for major and unusual purchases on SNP accounts.

How can she not bear some responsibility for the fact the bloke she lived with embezzled £400,000 from party funds?

It was her job and her responsibility to sign off on those accounts. She absolutely should have noticed the vast sums that were going out on Jags, motor homes and all the other luxuries.

Her pleading ignorance of what was going on in those accounts is not an excuse. It was her job to oversee them.

How the hell could she ever have been trusted to run the finances of a country when she couldn’t even run the finances of her own party or those in her own home?

However, having acted out the "wronged woman” in that BBC interview with Laura Kuenssberg, she then threw in the predictable misogyny argument, claiming people were only going after her because she was a woman. What utter drivel!

People are going after her because they don’t buy this. Especially the people in Scotland, where in a recent poll only 20 per cent said they accepted her version of events.

They, like the rest of us, think there’s so much more she isn’t saying. And they’re not buying her protestations that a wife can live with her husband for 15 years and not have any suspicions that he was spending too much.

They don’t believe she didn’t see the conveyor belt of luxuries flooding into her small home and that she couldn't have done more.

They don’t believe Murrell could have bought £3,000 lawnmowers, Mont Blanc pens, salt and pepper shakers costing £2,600 and her not say: “Where is the money coming from for all this?"

She may, as she said in that interview, have had separate bank accounts from her husband.

But still she knew what he earned in his job as the SNP’s chief executive. Just as he knew what she earned as First Minister. So, how come this super smart cookie didn’t do the math?

And how the hell could she be leader of a political party and have three people resign from the finance committee and not take action to bring her husband to justice?

Sturgeon signed off on all those SNP accounts and it's not like she didn’t know what she was doing. The woman trained as a solicitor, for God’s sake, so she’s more than capable of understanding accounts.

On top of all that, party members tried their damnedest for years to get the SNP’s books opened up, but they were blocked at every turn.

Even now, the new leader, John Swinney, is refusing to have an investigation into party accounts. Sturgeon didn’t convince anyone with her spurious defences at the weekend.

In fact, the silliness of it made me despise what she has become. Because even if you disagree with her politics, no one can deny Sturgeon was a formidable political force who took c**p from no one.

So, her playing the duped little woman made her seem ridiculous and a bit sad. It also reduced her because it’s the kind of argument that, had it been made by another woman in her presence, she’d have mocked them for it, despised them even. But there she was, hiding behind it.

Sturgeon needs to take responsibility. It’s exactly what she’d have demanded of other politicians had she still been First Minister. But now the spotlight’s on her, and one of the smartest, savviest women alive is asking us to believe that she couldn't have stopped what was going on in her own home – a home that was an actual crime scene.