Sturgeon tells politicians: 'Don't cosy up to Trump'

The Herald Scotland

5 days ago

Her remarks came as the first extracts of her book were serialised in a newspaper. They touched on her arrest, her miscarriage and saw her address rumours about her sexuality.
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At the event in Queen's Park Govanhill Parish Church, Ms Sturgeon said there was a "sense of hopelessness" in politics across the world, which leaders such as Mr Trump and Refiorm UK's Nigel Farage had exploited.
"There's a sense of despair," she said. "I think there is a sense that all the wrong people are in power — not here in Scotland — but there is a sense that the wrong people are taking the world in the wrong direction.
"You've got people like Donald Trump trying to persuade people that the real challenge is not climate change, but the policies that are being pursued to try to tackle climate change.
"And that's just one example of many.
"You know, people like Trump and Farage here in the UK, they've tapped into the fact that people are feeling disillusioned, really struggling financially, feeling a sense of hopelessness.
"And they are managing as things stand to persuade people that the cause of these problems are immigrants and gay people or trans people."
She said they were "selling utter snake oil as the solution, all to try to distract from the fact that they are part of the problem."
"What's the problem? The wealthy are hoarding too much of the wealth and power and influence in our country," she added.
Ms Sturgeon criticised Sir Keir Starmer for "trying to outdo Nigel Farage on immigration" and said he "should have the guts to stand up and say why the country needs immigration, why it's good for the country to be diverse. Why our economy needs people to come from other countries."
"So I think the antidote to the hopelessness is to offer people hope and to offer people the vision of a better future and a better country. I hope we can do that here in Scotland. I hope my party continues to do that, but we need more of that across the UK and across the world.
"Let's not try and cosy up to Donald Trump. Let's take on Donald Trump and his like and beat their hopelessness with hope."
Earlier this month, the Scottish Government announced funding for the 2025 Nexo Championship, which is currently taking place at the Trump International Golf Links in Aberdeenshire.
Mr Swinney spent around 75 minutes with the President during his visit to Scotland.
Earlier this week, at The Herald's Unspun Live event at the Fringe, Mr Swinney was asked if he liked Mr Trump.
He said he had "a very pleasant and courteous exchange with President Trump for most of our time together."
In her book, which has been serialised by the Times, Ms Sturgeon described the day she was arrested as "the worst day of my life" and said she may never get over the experience.
Her estranged husband, ex-SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, was arrested as part of a police investigation into the party's finances. He was later re-arrested and charged in connection with alleged embezzlement of party funds.
Ms Sturgeon, along with former SNP treasurer Colin Beattie, was also arrested and released without charge pending further inquiries. Earlier this year she announced she and Murrell had "decided to end" their marriage.
She writes of her "utter disbelief" when police raided the couple's home.
She said she lived for weeks in dread of being detained. "I woke up at the crack of dawn every day, having barely slept… wondering if this would be the day it happened," she writes. When it did, on June 11, 2023, she felt "horrified and devastated" but also "relieved in a strange sort of way".
After her release, Ms Sturgeon sought refuge at a friend's home in the north-east during a heatwave. "
'I badly needed peace and quiet, time to piece myself back together. I spent hours, looking out across the North Sea.
'At first, I wanted to somehow disappear into its vastness. Slowly but surely, though, the sea calmed me. As I watched the tide go in and out, I thought about the people who might have sat there a century ago, watching the same tides, feeling that they too had the weight of the world on their shoulders, and of those who would do so again, decades from now.
'It gave me some perspective.'
The investigation into her ended only when Mr Murrell was charged in March this year.
She also addresses persistent social media rumours about her sexuality and an alleged "secret relationship" with the French ambassador. The claims, she says, moved from "the darker recesses of social media" into public gossip by early 2020, with one neighbour even raising it with Mr Murrell.
A Guido Fawkes tweet that month alleged a super-injunction was in place to suppress the story. "I was furious. It was a blatant lie," she writes.
"Not only was there no superinjunction in place, but such a legal remedy isn't even available in Scots law.'
Ms Sturgeon says the rumours were rooted in "blatant homophobia" but that the insult itself "was water off a duck's back".
While she has spent more than 30 years in relationships with men, she adds: "I have never considered sexuality, my own included, to be binary… sexual relationships should be private matters."
Speaking at the Govanhill Book Festival, Ms Sturgeon said her memoir was her attempt to tell her story "in my own words" after more than 20 years at Holyrood, including nine as Scotland's first minister.
She admitted to feeling "slightly terrified" ahead of publication because of its personal content, but stressed: "Everything I wrote, I wrote intentionally."
She also insisted she has no plans for a second autobiography — "There is no volume two in my memoir" — but did not rule out trying her hand at a political thriller one day, joking there might be "too many people I want to kill" for one novel.
"There would be too many murders for one book. It could maybe be a series I suppose."