TOM HARRIS: Frankly, I'm not buying a meek and mild Nicola Sturgeon

Daily Mail​

2 days ago

It's just as well that Nicola Sturgeon believes her own hype. Because if early reaction to her less-than-frank memoirs, Frankly, is anything to go by, few others do.
The individual described in the 446-page opus will seem unfamiliar to most Scots. The Nicola Sturgeon of Frankly is a nervous, frightened woman completely lacking in confidence, forever seeking the approval of others and almost permanently on the brink of tears.
She spends sleepless nights fretting about whether she is good enough to do the job of a politician and she is deeply hurt when anyone says mean things about her.
Back on the planet earth, however, those who have observed Ms Sturgeon from her earliest days as an SNP activist all the way through to her dominance of her party as First Minister are more familiar with the 'nippy sweetie', the fierce and unforgiving woman so obsessed with independence that she seemed rarely to allow herself even the occasional smile, except, perhaps, when political opponents humiliatingly lost their seats.
But it is the meek and mild Nicola Sturgeon that appears throughout the book. The reader is invited to swallow this attempt to reinvent our former First Minister entirely as someone who only ever sought consensus and who was always loyal to friends and colleagues, until they behaved too badly to tolerate. And even then they were abandoned only with the heaviest heart.
For about the first third of the book, I found myself falling for this sleight of hand, starting to feel genuine sympathy for a misunderstood leader thrust almost unwillingly into the public eye. But that's when I began to see the pattern so carefully followed by Ms Sturgeon: the unexpected displays of emotional intelligence – something she has arguably failed to exhibit in public in the last 30 years – were convincing because they were so unexpected. But seen as a whole, the book is no more than an attempt to rewrite crucial parts of Scottish political history and enable the finger of blame to be pointed at anyone but her.
Those who might have been looking forward to a detailed explanation of the genuinely perplexing fall-out between Ms Sturgeon and her former friend, mentor and patron, Alex Salmond, will be disappointed.
Not only does the author point the finger of blame at the late SNP leader over the leaking to the media of sensitive information regarding complaints of sexual misconduct made about him, but she dismisses as a 'witch hunt' the Holyrood committee set up to investigate the Scottish Government's handling of those complaints after it concluded she had broken the Ministerial Code. A far more, reliable, independent review concluded the opposite, and that's enough for Ms Sturgeon.
And on her greatest and most controversial political defeat – her failed attempt to introduce self-ID for trans people – she energetically blames everyone else for sins of which she is herself guilty.
It was ordinary, decent Scottish women who raised concerns about the impact on women's rights if men who identified as women were allowed further access to women's spaces like rape shelters and changing rooms. Yet to Ms Sturgeon, 'it is beyond argument that the trans debate has been hijacked by voices on the far right . . . like Putin, Trump and Orbán.'
On one page she repeats her appalling assertion that many who campaigned against her Gender Recognition Reform Bill were 'raging homophobes' and 'racists', while on the very next she bemoans a failure of opponents to 'elevate the debate or illuminate the issues at the heart of it.'
More glaring than her tendency to point the finger of blame at others is her propensity not to mention certain things at all. The scandal of her and her ministers' deleted WhatsApp messages during the Covid pandemic, for example.
In the end, Frankly is a valiant, though failed, attempt to restore the reputation of an individual who promised so very much to party and country but who ultimately delivered very little. Had she been honest about her failings, perhaps Scotland could have forgiven her. But forgiveness demands repentance first, and there's precious little of that in this book.