Dance in the Rain

On​ the afternoon of 14 August – the publication day of her memoir – Nicola Sturgeon was interviewed by Kirsty Wark in the McEwan Hall in Edinburgh. Sturgeon was wearing a red top and red shoes: she wears red on days she needs to feel in control. But the audience members didn’t want to tell her off, rather to thank her for ‘all you’ve done for Scotland’. For a woman who thought herself too divisive to continue to lead the SNP, it must have felt like stepping in from a blizzard to find the fire blazing and a whisky labelled ‘spirit of 2015’ on the hearth. Outside the hall, however, the reception wasn’t so cheering. The extracts run by the Times were in turn chopped up into little packages of sensation in the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, and J.K. Rowling reposted a well-known selfie from October 2022 in which she wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan ‘Nicola Sturgeon: Destroyer of Women’s Rights’.

Polarised politics aren’t new in Scotland, but the tribalism, appetite for conspiracy theories and lack of empathy for ‘the other side’ evident in the latter stages of the independence referendum campaign of 2014, and which only increased after the result, created the perfect conditions for the uproar over the Gender Recognition Reform Act, which would have brought in self-identification for trans people. It was passed by the Scottish Parliament in December 2022 but subsequently blocked by Westminster. The bill, which was supported by the large majority of MSPs from all the mainstream parties at Holyrood except the Tories, became the most controversial and divisive piece of legislation in the Scottish Parliament’s history. In the end, it was the Gender Recognition Reform Act that killed Sturgeon’s leadership, not any failures during Covid (her mysteriously deleted WhatsApp messages, and the fact that despite her clear superiority to Boris Johnson in behaviour and messaging, the Scottish fatality rate was similar to that in England); not her feud with her mentor and predecessor as party leader, Alex Salmond; not even Operation Branchform, the fraud investigation that led to a raid on her house and her husband – Peter Murrell, then the SNP chief executive – being charged with embezzlement of more than £660,000 donated to the party.

Sturgeon believes that the rights of transgender people are not (and can never be) in conflict with the rights of women. When Isla Bryson – a transgender rapist who was briefly sent to a female jail – challenged that belief, all hell broke loose. Sturgeon couldn’t bring herself to say that Bryson was not a woman. She writes in her memoir that ‘it seemed obvious’ to her ‘that the gender question was not the relevant issue … What mattered was that Isla Bryson is a rapist. Identifying as a woman did not confer any automatic right to be accommodated in a female prison.’ Sturgeon admits that she ‘lost the dressing room’, but still insists, as she did at the time, that many of those who fought against single-sex spaces such as domestic violence shelters and prisons being used to accommodate trans people were not only transphobic, but ‘deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly, some of them, racist as well’. In the review of Frankly she published on her website, Rowling calls Sturgeon’s comments about her opponents at the time of the Bryson furore Sturgeon’s ‘basket of deplorables moment’.

In Frankly, Sturgeon concedes that she should have ‘hit the pause button when I realised, sometime in 2022, just how polarised the issue was becoming’. But it’s also true that the affair quickly became a vehicle for the transphobia that Sturgeon identified. ‘When your belief in your cause is so deeply rooted that there is literally no evidence that could shake it, it has become religious, and opposition will inevitably come to be seen, not as rational disagreement, but as a fundamental moral failing,’ Rowling writes of Sturgeon’s supposed inability to empathise with those who voted ‘No’ in the referendum. Yet the thing about the clash of two fundamentalisms is that each side believes this to be true of the other. Sturgeon’s opponents didn’t see the showdown over self-identification as a schism within feminism; for them it was a battle between misogynists and champions of women, with Sturgeon one of the misogynists – though gender equality was one of her earliest political priorities.

It’s hard to articulate what Sturgeon’s feminism meant to someone like me who moved back to Scotland in the mid-1990s, a country stifled by all-male clubs and all-male panels, with its politics and journalism dominated by ‘big beasts’, pretty much all of them men. Sturgeon was always willing to address what it meant to be a woman in power. Unlike Theresa May, she railed against the Daily Mail’s ‘Never mind Brexit, who won Legs-it!’ headline, and talked about her anxieties over the menopause. She continues to call attention to sexism in her memoir, though occasionally she seems to use it to protect herself from accountability. ‘I was hounded by journalists determined to find a way of making me responsible for the sexual behaviour of a man,’ she writes about the legitimate attempt to find out what she knew about the messages sent to a 16-year-old boy by her then finance secretary, Derek Mackay.

In the de-Sturgeonisation process that took place in the wake of her resignation in February 2023, the narrative was rewritten. Her relatability, gravitas and high approval ratings were forgotten; her managerialism, insularity and lack of transparency were stressed. That she had always seen herself as a cut above came as a surprise to those of us who had watched her stack chairs in dusty community halls. That she was aloof jarred with what I’d seen of her on the campaign trail chatting to all and sundry. But nearly thirty years after I came back to a Scotland that didn’t make room for women, the bonhomie of male politicians like Salmond was still the default mode. It wasn’t really that Sturgeon was ‘aloof’, more that she wasn’t clubbable. When she moved into Bute House, it ceased being a centre of late-night hobnobbing. She worked hard without playing hard, and some people didn’t like that. They were used to seeing the Scottish government as a Tudor court, and themselves as members of it.

Frankly is Sturgeon’s attempt to change the narrative again; she places at its centre her diligence and hard work, which she sees as born of a fear of failure. Her lack of confidence in childhood was accompanied, she writes, by ‘a burning ambition, a drive to succeed, a craving to be “seen”. I had – at risk of sounding daft – a very strong sense of “destiny”, a feeling that whatever I did in life would not be “ordinary”.’ Some have mocked this, saying that she sounds like Boris Johnson. But Johnson saw success as his birthright, while Sturgeon believed it would come to her only through the furious application that makes Jill a dull girl.

The tension between Sturgeon’s ambition and her ‘impostor syndrome’ is a recurring theme. It drives her to achieve, but also leads her to act against her own and others’ interests. When she finally became an MSP in 1999, after two failed attempts at a Westminster seat, she could take no pleasure in it. To lose on the constituency vote and sneak in on the list felt like cheating: ‘I had not been good enough to win Govan,’ she writes. ‘I didn’t deserve to be there.’ Her ambition may be the reason she did so little to damp down the mass adulation she attracted after taking over as leader and first minister, though she claims to have felt uncomfortable about it. Or perhaps, as her popularity grew, she began to believe in her own invincibility. Either way, it was catastrophic for the SNP, which was happy enough to stamp #ImWithNicola on election leaflets and merchandise, but was left stranded when the bubble burst. By then, Sturgeon’s reluctance to delegate or confer meant that there was no one to share the blame for her missteps, and no one capable of assuming her mantle, as she had Salmond’s.

Sturgeon doesn’t gloss over the extent to which she was Salmond’s creation. He saw in her a means to change the party – from rural to urban, from centrist to left of Labour, taking on her own characteristics – and appointed himself her mentor. It was Salmond who suggested she should stand for Westminster in 1992 at the age of 21, while she was still a law student at Glasgow University. It was Salmond who pushed her to withdraw from the 2004 leadership contest, after he belatedly decided to stand to become party leader for a second time, in exchange for becoming his deputy and anointed successor. As first minister, he made her health secretary, a job she loved but had to give up when he decided she should be in charge of referendum planning. In her interview with Wark, Sturgeon chafed at the suggestion that Salmond was guilty of coercive control, but conceded: ‘His approval mattered too much and his disapproval knocked my confidence … he probably played on that a little bit.’

As his deputy, Sturgeon tended to defer to his judgment even when she disagreed with it. She didn’t openly challenge him over the release on compassionate grounds of the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi, though she feared it might bring down the government. She thought his 2010 election slogan, ‘More Nats, less Cuts’, was weak and ‘grammatically offensive’, but didn’t say so. He took a week-long trip to China when he had promised to read her White Paper on independence; she claims he never read the whole thing. When she became first minister, Salmond resented being sidelined. He blamed her ‘softly, softly’ approach to a second independence referendum – he had resigned as leader in Holyrood after the failure of the 2014 vote – for the loss of his Gordon seat in the 2017 Westminster election; she was incensed by his decision later that year to host a show on the Kremlin-funded channel RT.

But it was the events leading up to Salmond’s trial and acquittal on a string of sexual assault charges that sparked the feud that continues to dominate Scottish politics almost a year after his death. It will have come as no surprise to Sturgeon that the chapter of her memoir devoted to their co-dependent relationship has made his supporters furious. It is full of digs and includes the unsubstantiated suggestion that Salmond himself might have leaked the sexual harassment allegations to the Daily Record, in order to get ahead of the story. His widow, Moira, said Sturgeon’s criticisms of Salmond have caused her ‘great distress’; she intends to continue the legal action her husband initiated, accusing the Scottish government of misfeasance – the wrongful exercise of lawful authority – over the handling of charges against him.

What strikes the reader is not Sturgeon’s desire for revenge, but the void their falling-out left in her life. Long after they stopped speaking, she continued to hold conversations with him in her head; at night she dreamed they were still on good terms and woke up feeling ‘utterly bereft’. By the time he died of a heart attack in Macedonia last October, she thought she felt nothing, only to experience an ‘overwhelming sense of sadness and loss’. But in response to his claims to be the victim of a conspiracy to destroy him, she comes out swinging. These were, she writes, ‘the cries of a man who was not prepared to look honestly at himself in the mirror … He died without reckoning with himself.’

Sturgeon herself lurches between the self-justifying and the self-lacerating. When it comes to the miscarriage she suffered in January 2011, she is unflinching. Though Murrell was thrilled about the pregnancy, she was less sure how she felt, and so when she lost the baby at eleven weeks, she wondered if she was being punished for not wanting it ‘badly enough’. This confession, along with a harrowing description of the four days she spent waiting for the baby to ‘pass’, again shows Sturgeon using her platform to challenge taboos. Any hint of coldness, inferred by some critics because of the graphic details she includes, is countered by the way she considers the teenage daughter, Isla, she might now have had. ‘I don’t feel that my life is worth less because I am not a mum,’ she writes. ‘But I do deeply regret not getting the chance to be Isla’s mum … and I know I will mourn her for the rest of my life.’

By contrast, the revelation that she has ‘never considered sexuality, my own included, to be binary’ feels a bit cheap. It comes after a discussion of the harm caused by the false rumours that she had an affair with the (female) French ambassador. But the line itself is a tease, an invitation to further speculation. On her political mistakes, Sturgeon is similarly erratic. She agonises over minor misjudgments, such as the broadside she launched at Labour during a rally arranged to foster cross-party support for a devolved parliament in 1992, yet on some of her government’s greatest failures – not reforming council tax, failing to narrow the gap in attainment between richer and poorer pupils – she says almost nothing.

For all​ the introspection, there is also evidence of the Sturgeon sleight of hand: a display of self-flagellation used to extricate herself from a sticky situation. It’s a trick she stumbled on in 2010 when she ‘came close to killing’ her political career. Approached by the wife of a constituent charged with benefit fraud, she wrote a letter in which she referred to his crime as a ‘mistake’, set out a list of mitigating factors, and asked the sheriff to consider a non-custodial sentence. The letter was read out in court and seized on by a journalist, leading to calls for her resignation as health secretary. ‘Never explain, never apologise’ was Salmond’s mantra. In a rare pre-leadership act of rebellion, Sturgeon ignored him and threw herself on the mercy of her fellow MSPs. After she apologised, she writes, ‘the debate quickly became about whether politics would be better if politicians had more space to admit mistakes.’ What she doesn’t say is that Salmond in fact robustly defended her, only to find, according to Annabel Goldie, then leader of the Scottish Tories, his ‘decibel delivery of rhetoric and arrogance’ being compared unfavourably to her ‘humility’.

Sturgeon learned the lesson well. Her memoir is littered with such admissions and quasi-admissions. Some of them are accompanied by excuses that suggest her errors of judgment were a result of her goodness. Should she have sacked the permanent secretary to the Scottish government, Leslie Evans, after a judicial review found her investigation into the initial allegations of sexual harassment against Salmond to be ‘tainted by apparent bias’? Well, maybe. But Evans’s mistake was not malicious, Sturgeon writes, and ‘for a man accused of sexual misconduct to be able to bully the woman responsible for investigating him out of her job would have sent a signal … that powerful men always win in the end, no matter how they behave.’

Was she wrong to ignore Salmond’s advice that Murrell should resign as the party’s chief executive to avoid a conflict of interest? Perhaps, she says, but she didn’t want to deprive her husband of a job he loved, and she suspected that Salmond just didn’t like him. It is interesting to note that on both occasions her decision appears to have been based on second-guessing what Salmond wanted and then thwarting it, which might be understandable but doesn’t seem like a good way to run a government. If Murrell had resigned, there would have been no Operation Branchform. A more valid excuse is the one she gives for the pledges she failed to deliver on. She points out that she had to fight the Brexit referendum (2016), three general elections (2015, 2017 and 2019) and two Holyrood elections (2016 and 2021) as well as steering the country through a pandemic. During her time as first minister, no fewer than five prime ministers – Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak – held office. No wonder she was exhausted.

Her main achievements, she argues, include the Scottish Child Payment (which isn’t restricted to two children); the expansion of early years provision; the baby box given to every newborn, which contains an impressive selection of clothes and essential items; the National Investment Bank; and Scotland’s departure from the UK’s structure of income tax, which, she says, has made the system more progressive while raising millions of pounds in extra revenue. (Scotland has six tax bands to England, Wales and Northern Ireland’s three. The top band is currently 48 per cent as opposed to 45 per cent in the rest of the UK.) But this legacy can be seen as disappointingly scant: it’s hard to avoid the feeling that given the party’s popularity, and her own, she could have done more. And there are other policy failures for critics to note. In 2016 Sturgeon’s government slashed funding to the Alcohol and Drug Partnerships despite warnings it would lead to a rise in drug deaths (Scotland now has the highest per capita toll in Western Europe). During Covid, it allowed untested hospital patients into care homes, a decision some believe contributed to many deaths of staff and residents. Perhaps the biggest scandal of Sturgeon’s time as first minister involved the procurement of the Glen Sannox and the Glen Rosa from Ferguson Marine Ltd for CalMac, whose ferries provide a ‘lifeline service’ between the islands and the mainland. Both ships were years behind schedule and hugely over budget. The total cost is now estimated at £460 million, more than four and a half times the original price. The Glen Sannox was delivered in November 2024, nearly seven years late. The Glen Rosa is expected between April and June next year, around eight years late. A BBC documentary found evidence that potential preferential treatment was given to Ferguson Marine; an investigation led by Barry Smith KC found no evidence of fraud, but said questions remained over the integrity of the process.

Sturgeon sometimes resorted to grievance politics, blaming Westminster for Holyrood’s lack of powers while failing to use the ones she had. But one of her often overlooked successes is the SNP’s positive messaging on immigration. In part this was possible because Scotland’s demographics make it more dependent on imported labour, but it was also born of a genuine desire on Sturgeon’s part to portray Scotland as an inclusive, welcoming place. Some may call it virtue signalling, but when you consider the xenophobia currently being whipped up in Britain, it becomes clear that messaging matters. Despite all the setbacks, when her performance is measured against that of any of her UK counterparts it’s not surprising she was the one who kept her job for so many years.

Sturgeon​ also had the matter of independence to deal with. It’s easy for ‘No’ voters to criticise the amount of time this took up, but what is the leader of a party whose founding mission is separation from the rest of the UK supposed to do? From 2016 onwards, she had to placate both the movement’s radicals, who wanted her to push towards independence, and the critics who wanted her to concentrate on running the country. The referendum was supposed to have settled the matter for a generation, but Brexit pulled Remain-voting Scotland out of the EU against its will. The SNP held that this ‘significant and material change of circumstances’ justified another attempt to gain independence. Sturgeon wasn’t convinced she should hold a second referendum, but when, the day after the Brexit vote, a journalist asked her about the chances of one being held, she found herself saying it was ‘highly likely’, which boxed her in. In March 2017, after May refused to give ‘even cursory consideration’ to proposals that would have allowed Scotland a closer relationship with the EU, Sturgeon gained Holyrood’s approval to ask Westminster for the delegation of powers necessary for the Scottish government to hold a vote.

The naivety of this strategy seems unfathomable now. Sturgeon herself says it was ‘absolutely right and catastrophically wrong’. May immediately rejected the idea, saying ‘Now is not the time’; in the snap general election called soon afterwards the SNP lost more than a third of its seats. And so the party found itself trapped in a conundrum it is still trying to resolve: how do you deliver independence if the country you want to separate from has control over the only mechanism by which voters can demonstrate their support for separation? What use is it returning successive SNP administrations to the Scottish Parliament if the UK government refuses to accept them as having a mandate?

In 2022, Sturgeon unexpectedly decided to ask the Supreme Court to rule on whether Scotland had the legal competence to hold a binding referendum without Westminster’s say-so. This had never been tested because in 2012 Cameron agreed to a vote. In Frankly, Sturgeon explains that the move was not, as many assumed, a wildly optimistic gamble, but a means of managing expectations. Though she was almost certain the Supreme Court would say no, the position on legal competence had become ‘something akin to a collective delusion, allowing too many independence supporters to ignore the reality of our situation’. After the Supreme Court’s judgment, Sturgeon declared that the 2024 general election should serve as a de facto vote on independence. This was, she admits, ‘terminology that made me seem to be doing what I had always rejected: staging some kind of wild cat referendum with no legitimacy’. Well, exactly. Her position appears to be that independence will be achieved only when it is the ‘settled will of the nation’, as the demand for a Scottish Parliament was at the time of the devolution referendum in 1997. It seems strange, then, with support for independence hovering around 50 per cent, that the party should expend so much energy on process, and so little on making the economic and social case for separation.

Sturgeon resigned before her de facto referendum plan could be put into action. The resignation in January 2023 of the New Zealand premier Jacinda Ardern, with whom she had always felt an affinity, was the unlikely trigger for Sturgeon’s own departure weeks later. In Frankly, she says she had three main motivations: exhaustion, fear that she was destroying the chances for independence and a sense that she was ‘becoming an increasingly polarising figure in Scottish politics’.

Her arrest in June that year was ‘the worst day of [her] life’ and the two years she had to wait to find out she had been cleared ‘a form of mental torture’. The toll that leadership had taken on her was clear to see when she broke down in front of the Covid inquiry. She writes that she went for counselling, having come ‘perilously close to a breakdown’. You can tell: Frankly is full of wellbeing platitudes. She has ‘endured [her] darkest days’, ‘found reserves of strength’ and learned to ‘dance in the rain’. Writing the book was, she says, a form of ‘therapy in action’. This is the problem. Tempted, no doubt, by a £300,000 advance and an opportunity to face down her critics, she kept on writing as her husband was charged, her marriage imploded and her mentor died, all of which gives her memoir an unusual rawness. But how could she produce a considered account of her time in office when she was still so emotionally involved, and her story was not at an end? Frankly tells the story of a shy working-class girl who made her way to the top, and what it cost her. But until events have run their course – until Murrell has appeared in court, which is unlikely to happen until after May next year, and the culture war has subsided – Sturgeon’s legacy will remain fiercely contested.