What is the point of Nicola Sturgeon's memoir?

Spectator

4 days ago

Nicola Sturgeon's memoir Frankly, finally published today, is already looking like the most ill-advised autobiography since Prince Harry's Spare. Her attempts to denigrate her former mentor, the late Alex Salmond, have rebounded disastrously. Her teasing about her 'non-binary' sexuality sounded contrived. Her complaints of victimhood ring hollow coming from a politician who had a relatively easy ride during her time in office, not least because the metropolitan left and much of the media chose to idolise her as a Caledonian Jacinda Ardern and scourge of Boris Johnson.
She even picked a pointless new fight with J.K. Rowling. In her memoir she accuses the author of having made her feel 'less safe' in 2022 at the height of the trans self-ID row by wearing a t-shirt suggesting the FM was a 'destroyer of women's rights'. Rowling is now proposing to auction a copy of Frankly defaced with her comments for the benefit of For Women Scotland.
The pettiness is what really surprises. Whatever you thought about her policies, in nearly 20 years at the summit of politics – eight of them as first minister – Sturgeon was widely regarded as a class act. She was always well briefed; a gifted communicator who rarely put a foot wrong – until her adoption of radical transgender ideology.
But even here, most believed she was at least sincere in her LGBT advocacy, if disastrously misguided in her conviction that men could change sex (and that a double rapist, Isla Bryson, could in any sense be called a woman).
However, in the pages of her memoir and in the interviews she has given in advance of its publication, Scotland's leading living nationalist emerges as an inveterate gossip with a casual attitude to the truth and a rather tasteless inclination to defame the dead.
She even boasts about trading salacious sexual tittle-tattle about Salmond with the late Queen Elizabeth II who, we learn, 'loves a bit of gossip'. This may well be true, but is too much information.
But it is the distortions of historical fact that are most disturbing. Sturgeon says Alex Salmond was 'implacably opposed' to the same-sex marriage legislation passed in 2012 while he was first minister. 'Fiction' says Alex Neil, the former SNP health secretary who actually piloted the legislation through Holyrood. Salmond, he tweeted, was a firm supporter of this ground-breaking legislation.
In her ITV interview, Sturgeon described her 'cold fury' that Salmond had not bothered to read the 2013 independence white paper, 'Scotland's Future', the final draft of which she had prepared with a team of researchers and civil servants. She writes: 'I knew his good intention [to read it] would not survive contact with the first glass of in-flight champagne.' She says he later phoned her inebriated from a racecourse. Shock, horror.
It is true that Salmond was a betting man and wrote a newspaper column on horse racing, but the idea that the then first minister of Scotland, who had been leader of the SNP since 1990 and had taken the party of independence to its first election victory in 2007, and then its first landslide in 2011, was ignorant about SNP policy on independence is just risible. Salmond negotiated the Edinburgh Agreement with David Cameron which led to the independence referendum in the first place.
What possible motive could Sturgeon have had for telling a tale that has been contradicted by legal experts such as the former SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC and the former justice secretary Kenny MacAskill, who says it is 'laughable'. Sturgeon comes across as a pedantic wannabe with surprisingly little grasp of the big picture. Indeed, in a little-noticed passage in Frankly, she reveals that she is no longer committed to the very independence project she was supposed to have been fighting for.
She forecasts, approvingly, that in 20 years, Scotland, Wales and even Ireland''will join with England – enjoying the benefits of the home rule it will gain as a result – in a new British Isles confederation of nations.' That is not the sovereign, Norway-style independence the SNP has always envisaged. It sounds more like the 'devo max' that she excoriated during the 2014 independence campaign.
Her assaults on Salmond are all the more tasteless because he can't respond. Nor can he rebut the claim she makes in Frankly that he may have leaked to a tabloid newspaper the story about his alleged sexual misconduct. This was rebutted for him on Sunday by the former Daily Record political editor, David Clegg, who wrote the story about the Scottish government's investigation into Salmond's alleged misconduct. Stuegeon's claim is just 'not credible', he says.
Sturgeon, of course, led the Scottish government to subsequent humiliation over this botched investigation in the Court of Session in 2019.
What is all this intended to achieve? Is this supposed to humanise her in the eyes of the London media circles she hopes to join? She is considering relocation to London.
Nationalist luminaries have lined up to dissociate themselves. Joanna Cherry says she will set the record straight in her own book later this year. Kenny MacAskill fired both barrels at Sturgeon's integrity. 'She is without both shame and honour,' he told BBC Scotland.
But what is perhaps more significant than these comments from nationalist politicians who were not exactly close allies has been the deafening silence from SNP politicians, supportive journalists and the party membership. Though, if you listen, you can just hear the squirms of embarrassment.