Peter Murrell is serving his sentence at HMP Dumfries after pleading guilty to embezzling £400,000 worth of SNP funds

Nicola Sturgeon has vowed never to visit her estranged husband in prison after he was jailed for embezzling around £400,000 of Scottish National Party finances.

The ex-Scottish First Minister told attendees at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe that Peter Murrell had been lying to her "right up to the day he pled guilty".

Murrell, the former chief executive of the SNP, pleaded guilty on May 25 and was later sentenced to more than five years in prison.

Ms Sturgeon, who tied the knot with Murrell in 2010, was initially arrested as part of Police Scotland's Operation Branchform investigation.

Speaking at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Ms Sturgeon complained media scrutiny had given her estranged husband "an easier bloody ride than I've had".

She added: “I found out less than a week, I think, before he pled guilty that he was going to plead guilty, so I didn’t have very long to kind of prepare myself for that.

“I had still been thinking, ‘Oh, he’s going to go to trial, that might be a year away’.

“But when the prosecution read out some of the detail of it in court, there was this line that hit me like a tonne of bricks, and it was that he had been negotiating a guilty plea since March 3. And I hadn’t known that.

“And so, what point am I making? He was still lying to me right up to the day he pled guilty, and that’s a really, really, really hard thing to process.”

Appearing at Iain Dale’s All Talk show, Ms Sturgeon categorically ruled out visiting Murrell.

“I’m not going to speak to him, I’m not going to visit him,” she said.

Murrell is serving his sentence at HMP Dumfries, some 67 miles away from the couple's home in Uddingston, South Lanarkshire.

Following the SNP's scandal, Ms Sturgeon relocated from Scotland to London.

Scotland's longest-serving First Minister wrote about moving to Westminster in her tell-all political memoir, Frankly.

Ms Sturgeon wrote: "I am also enjoying something I have never done before: living outside Scotland.

"I am not yet sure how long this will last, though it will definitely not be forever... The shift in perspective is already doing me good... As much as I love home and will always be grateful for everything Scotland has given me – and for all the support I get from people there – a bit of temporary distance feels healthy as I navigate the transition to a new phase of life."

During her return to the Scottish capital, Ms Sturgeon also addressed her spat with Harry Potter author JK Rowling.

She said: “I’ll say this as gently and as directly [as I can], I’m not at war with JK Rowling - she seems to be at war with me. If there’s going to be an amnesty, I think it’s probably going to have to come from her.

“We disagree on more than one thing. We disagreed on independence, we clearly disagree on trans rights, but my God, that woman is obsessed with me and I don’t spend as much time thinking about her as she clearly does about me, so sorry.”

Ms Sturgeon was also asked what question she would like Mr Dale to put to ex-SNP colleague Joanna Cherry when he interviews her next week.

Ms Cherry had been highly critical of Ms Strugeon's stance on trans rights during her stint as SNP leader.

However, Ms Sturgeon said: “Again, somebody else who seems to have an obsession with me that I’m afraid is not reciprocated. It’s an unrequited obsession.

“It’s not a question, it’s a challenge, right: can she get through more than 30 seconds of the answer to any question without talking about me?”