Dear Nicola,
Well, well. Here we are in the brave new world of your post-political life, one in which you have swapped your role as former SNP warrior-leader for that of in-demand celebrity author on the promotional circuit. Everybody wants a piece of Nicola, and no wonder.
As you point out in Frankly, your new 464-page autobiography, you were the first woman to enter Bute House as First Minister, the first female Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland in more than 600 years and someone who ‘won all eight of the elections I contested as SNP leader’.
You didn’t actually win independence for Scotland, which is the sole reason for your political existence, but that awkward fact does not dint the self-congratulatory tone which drifts through these pages like Brigadoon mist. ‘I have achieved more than I could ever have imagined and believe I have made an impact to be proud of,’ you write. ‘I have made my fair share of mistakes, but I have always done my best.’
Well, that is one way of putting it, darling. Another way could be that under your stewardship the SNP became to be defined not by proficient governance but by an obsession with independence at all costs, an empty rhetoric fuelled by wishful thinking that took precedence over policy and caused irreparable damage to Scotland.
Health, education and transport all suffered while you were in charge and public services are still under strain, while Scotland’s £26.2bn fiscal deficit is more than double that of the UK. Nicola, when I look at what you have done to my homeland, I feel like weeping, not cheering.
Yours is hardly a legacy to boast about, but here you are, relishing being interviewed about Frankly by ex-BBC Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark in front of a packed audience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. ‘I think the monarchy should end quite soon,’ you chirped and everyone applauded because there are people out there who still love you, Nicola, despite everything.
You loftily explained to them that while you had ‘huge admiration’ for Queen Elizabeth, her son King Charles and other members of the royal family did not have the ‘same mystique’, causing people to see the ‘absurdities’ of the monarchy more clearly. Diminishing allure encouraging a fresh focus on the farcical? Nicola, how I laughed and laughed. For after reading your book, it is clear that the same sentiments apply to you, too.
Nicola Sturgeon poses for the front cover of her autobiography, Frankly
Former first minister Nicola Sturgeon and BBC presenter Kirsty Wark at the launch of her memoir at the Edinburgh International Book Festival
In Frankly, you waste no time in depicting yourself as the kind of adorkable child who loved books and was always on the side of the underdog. Later you write of how you have suffered from imposter syndrome throughout your life – oh really? I cynically interpreted this as a naked plea for sympathy, because those who harbour feelings of guilt about something always want others to feel sorry for them.
And elsewhere you are always banging on about the ‘thick skin’ you had to grow, the multiple ‘tough’ situations over which you triumphed and boasting that ‘there is no doubt that I was a massive electoral asset’.
Can both these Nicolas – quivering imposter and feisty upstart (as you describe yourself on page 321) – be the real deal? Perhaps you are more emotionally complex than you appear, but after wading through your disappointingly dull and cliché-ridden text – a Nicola world in which salt is rubbed into wounds, all cylinders are fired, red mists descend, glasses are half-full and Alex Salmond is a ‘political colossus’ – I doubt this very much.
Nothing in your book hints at a deep hinterland and no one survives decades at the top without being a total bruiser with an ego the size of Ben Nevis. It takes one to know one.
For Nicola, this might surprise you, but in many ways we are sisters under the skin, with many similarities in our backgrounds. Both of us grew up on council-housing estates on the peripheries of Scottish towns, both of us were educated in Scottish secondary schools, both of us were working-class kids who did well to escape the strictures of our backgrounds.
Both of us even lived in Glasgow at the same time and went to the same nightclubs. Was that really you I saw drinking gin and dancing at Fury Murray’s in your Dr Martens and CND badges back in 1992? Good for you girlfriend, but that is where the similarities end.
You, Nicola, are the kind of professionally chippy Scot who became radicalised at the age of seven, you claim, when visiting the ‘big house’ where your grandfather worked as a gardener.
Despite the ‘nice’ family who lived there giving you ice lollies, wee Nic felt a keen sense of ‘them and us’, and that ‘they’ somehow felt ‘superior’ to her. In comparison, I was the kind of Scot who went to a big house and thought, I’d like one of these for myself one day. Later at university you felt ‘intimidated by the privately educated kids who dominated our law lectures’.
And you were galvanised into a political career after being incensed by the miners’ strikes and Margaret Thatcher, the woman who ‘motivated and shaped’ your politics more than anyone else.
Posh people, Thatcher, a bit of an inferiority complex? Good God, was this all it took to propel you into office and plunge Scotland into a ten-year nightmare of Sturgeonomics and the bin fire of your Gender Recognition Reform Bill? It is all so depressingly… pedestrian.
Sturgeon took over from Salmond as SNP leader and first minister in 2014 and remained in that role until her resignation in March 2023
Peter Murrell, the ex-husband of Ms Sturgeon, was charged by Police Scotland detectives over embezzlement of funds from the Scottish National Party in 2024
JK Rowling, with whom you clashed so often over the loss of single-sex spaces for women and the spectre of trans rights trumping women’s rights, has written a coruscating review of Frankly.
She accuses you of causing ‘real, lasting harm by presiding over and encouraging a culture in which women have been silenced, shamed, persecuted and placed in situations that are degrading and unsafe’ because they didn’t subscribe to what the Harry Potter author calls your ‘luxury beliefs’. It is hard to argue with that, but no doubt you will try.
Meanwhile political commentators are already pointing out that your book is more notable for its evasions and omissions than for any clarity it brings to the murk of Scottish politics. You still claim you knew nothing about your mentor Alex Salmond’s reputation as a serial sexual harasser and all you have to say about your former husband Peter Murrell being charged with embezzling SNP funds is that you are, phew, relieved that no charges were brought against you. ‘I knew I was innocent,’ you write, which offers little in the way of wifely support.
When ITV’s Julie Etchingham asked you this week how you felt when you saw your husband being arrested by police officers, you replied, ‘I don’t really have a clear memory of that,’ which is convenient to say the least. Etchingham also asked you about transgender rapist Isla Bryson, aka Adam Graham, the male-born prisoner whose determination to serve his sentence in a women’s prison ended your political career.
Even now you cannot quite admit you were wrong to support his wish and only concede that you should have ‘paused’ the debate. ‘They are a biological male,’ you said of Bryson, adding that anyone who raped women ‘probably forfeits the right to be the gender of their choice’. That ‘probably’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting, Nicola. And it proves you are still deep in the weeds on this issue.
All week you have being doing the rounds to promote your book and the laugh is you are exposing yourself to more scrutiny than ever before. To be honest, I don’t think you are handling it well. Your tendency towards passive aggression keeps bubbling to the surface and I can see that you are trying not to get annoyed when media outlets keep asking impertinent questions about trans rights and gender self-identification, when all you want to do is talk about yourself and ‘the raw talent I had for politics’ (page 113).
‘Not a single trans person has ever said to me, we wish you hadn’t tried,’ you huffed to C4 News. ‘Forces on the far right have weaponised this issue,’ you told BBC Breakfast, which is an outrageous thing to say. Nicola, I’m rather glad you no longer have the power or clout to be rude to journalists who irritate you, just like you were back in the good old days. Now, just like any other two-bit celeb out on the circuit with a book to flog, you’ve just got to suck it up in the name of publicity.
For these days it doesn’t seem to matter how terrible or misguided or inept a politician might be, there is always a pot of gold at the end of their rainbow. There is always a publishing deal, a chat show appearance, a future beyond the failings of their time in office and dazzling new opportunities denied to the electorate they left behind. Does any of that matter to you, Nicola? Frankly my dear, you don’t seem to give a damn.
Yours aye,
Jan
