Nicola Sturgeon: My miscarriage, sexuality and the day I was arrested

Times

a day ago

Eight days out of office, the novelty of a long lie-in hadn't worn off. At 7am on April 5, 2023, I was still in bed, half-asleep and only vaguely aware that my husband Peter had gone downstairs to answer the door. It was with a sense of utter disbelief that I realised the police were in my home, that they had a warrant to arrest my husband and search the house.
I was in despair, struggling to comprehend what had happened. It didn't help that a few hours later what seemed like the entirety of the UK's media was camped outside. For days, I didn't step out the front door. I had only just started to recover a sense of equilibrium when another bombshell dropped. On April 19, the SNP's Treasurer, Colin Beattie, was also arrested. The media was full of speculation that, as party leader, I would be next.
I felt like I had fallen into the plot of a dystopian novel. I tried to live my life as normally as I could, reminding myself that I had done nothing wrong. But I woke up at the crack of dawn every day, having barely slept, with my stomach in knots, wondering if this would be the day it happened. When it eventually did happen, I was horrified and devastated, though also relieved in a strange sort of way. At least the ordeal of waiting was over. Arrangements were made for me to attend a police station on Sunday, June 11.
At that point, a depth of resilience I didn't know I had kicked in. The day before attending at the police station, I passed the theory section of my driving test. My first instinct had been to cancel, but, in deciding not to, I did what has helped pull me through ever since. Passing my driving test has to be one of my proudest achievements, and not just because I did it at 53. The circumstances I did it in bordered on surreal. My early lessons took place with the media still outside my house. My brilliant instructor was unflappable. He would arrive to pick me up in the full glare of media scrutiny. I would steel myself to open my front door, get into the car and drive away, with the cameras recording my every move.
Sunday, June 11, was the worst day of my life. Being arrested and questioned by the police is an experience I'm not sure I will ever get over. When I eventually left the police station, late that afternoon, I was in a bad state mentally. I went to a friend's house in the northeast of Scotland and stayed for a week. It was during a heatwave, and yet I was stuck inside, terrified that the media would find me. 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.
When I eventually returned home, a new normality kicked in. It was obviously impossible to put it all out of my mind. I carried a sense of dread and anxiety about what might lie ahead. For almost a year, aside from stories about the investigation appearing in the media (sourced from where, I don't know), nothing happened. And then, in April 2024, almost exactly one year on from the search of our home, Peter was re-arrested and, this time, charged. It was another dark moment in what felt like a nightmare with no end.
Even so, it did bring me a brief glimmer of hope. Would I now be formally cleared? It took only a few hours for that possibility to be extinguished. A statement issued by the Crown Office confirmed that the investigation into me was ongoing. I was distraught. I couldn't understand why it was taking so long for the justice system to accept what I knew beyond doubt to be true. I had not committed any crime. I also didn't know how much longer I could cope.
The investigation was the first thing I thought about when I woke up in the morning and the last thing in my mind before I fell asleep (if I fell asleep) at night. On some days, I could lock it away and carry on, almost as if everything was normal. On others, it paralysed me.
I was frightened. The rational part of my brain told me that as I had done nothing wrong, there could, by definition, be no evidence to the contrary. But the longer it dragged on, the more scared and paranoid I became. I worried that the 'system' might reach the conclusion that I was guilty of something. Or, at the very least, that I would be forced to prove my innocence in court.
I felt embarrassed, ashamed even. Not because of anything I had actually done, but because of what many people would suspect I had done. I accept that the police and Crown Office were doing their jobs. I retain both faith in and respect for our country's criminal justice system. However, none of that changes this fact: being the subject of a high-profile criminal investigation for almost two years, especially having committed no crime, was like a form of mental torture.
The moment of exoneration arrived, finally, on March 20, 2025. It was a day of deeply mixed emotions. Peter appeared in court, and, of course, nothing I say here is meant as commentary on the situation he is in. However, around the middle of the day, my lawyer called with confirmation that the investigation was over and I would face no further action. I came off the phone and burst into tears. The feeling of relief, and release, was overwhelming.
My husband Peter never put pressure on me, but I knew how much he wanted to be a dad. I was more ambivalent. All through my thirties, I waited for an uncontrollable biological urge to kick in, but it never happened. What kicked in, instead, was an awareness that I was reaching the 'now or never' stage of my life; a creeping anxiety that I would wake up one morning when it was too late to do anything about it and find myself full of regret.
For me, then, it was a case of wanting to be able to tell myself that we had tried, even if it turned out that it wasn't meant to be. What actually happened is that I got pregnant very quickly. By mid-October 2010, we found ourselves in an Edinburgh hotel room, looking at a positive pregnancy test. Peter was ecstatic. I wanted to be. I told him I was. But — and I still feel so guilty about this — I was deeply conflicted.
In truth, as a woman of 40, I had assumed that if I got pregnant at all, it would take much longer. In my stupid, work-obsessed mind the timing couldn't have been worse. By the Scottish election, I would be six months pregnant. It may seem hard to believe now, but even in 2010 it wasn't obvious how voters would react to a heavily pregnant candidate. Was I jeopardising my chances of re-election? Worse, given my position as Deputy First Minister, was I risking the party's chances? I was riven by practical worries too. How would I cope? Elections are exhausting. Would I be able to do my job, never mind help lead an election campaign?
These thoughts obliterated any sense of happiness that I might have felt. I was overwhelmed by guilt. I felt guilty about being pregnant, about not feeling happier about being pregnant, about not being as happy as Peter was, about hiding that from him. Later, what I would feel most guilty about were the days I had wished I wasn't pregnant. There's still a part of me that sees what happened as my punishment for that.
We decided we would tell our families on Christmas Day. Naturally, they were over the moon, and their excitement rubbed off. I started to feel better, happier. The nausea also abated. I didn't realise then, of course, that this was because the pregnancy had already ended.
On the morning of December 30, I noticed some spots of blood. I'd probably have ignored it but for an appointment I had that day with the GP for my flu jab. Since I was there anyway, I decided to mention it to her. I was expecting her to tell me it was nothing to worry about. Instead, she made an urgent appointment at the early pregnancy clinic at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, and that is where Peter and I spent the morning of Hogmanay 2010.
I think I'd known in my heart what the outcome would be, but I was still hoping for the best. It seemed that suddenly, belatedly, I wanted to be pregnant after all. The nurse who did the scan was lovely. I didn't really know what I was looking for on the screen, but her face told me what I needed to know. The baby was gone.
We were taken into a side room and the nurse explained what we should expect. It was all very matter of fact. For four days I was in constant agony, the most excruciating pain I have ever experienced. And yet still, amidst it all, I went to work. On January 3, I attended a memorial service at Rangers Football Club in my constituency, to mark the 40th anniversary of the Ibrox disaster, and went from there to visit the NHS24 call centre to thank staff for their efforts over the festive period. There is a photo of me from that day that I find impossible to look at, the pain and anguish etched on my face.
Eventually, four days later, during the evening of January 4, 2011, the pregnancy 'passed'. I had the presence of mind to call Peter into the bathroom and, together, we flushed our 'baby' down the toilet. We later resolved to try again, but I knew then that we had lost our one chance.
I was desolate and heartbroken for myself, but more so for Peter. I was consumed by guilt all over again, convinced that it was all my fault, that the stress of worrying about the impact on the election had caused the miscarriage; that I was being punished for not wanting the baby badly enough, for having even wished it away. These feelings have never quite left me.
I have always believed our baby would have been a girl. We would have called her Isla. Her middle name would have been Margaret, after my gran and Peter's mum. She would be in her early teens now, possibly causing us all sorts of trouble.
I don't want to give the impression that I am full of regret at not having children. I'm not. If I could turn the clock back and make it so, I would choose to have a child, but only if I could still do the other things I've been able to do too. I don't feel that my life is worth less.
But I do deeply regret not getting the chance to be Isla's mum. It might not make sense, but she feels real to me. And I know that I will mourn her for the rest of my life.
In the early weeks of 2020, there was an issue gnawing away in the background. I was starting to get under my skin. For some time, social media had been awash with 'rumours' that I was having a secret relationship with a woman. There were slightly different versions of the story, but the consistent theme seemed to be that I was having a torrid lesbian affair with the woman who was at that time the French ambassador to the UK, and who would later become the French Foreign Minister, Catherine Colonna.
In one of the variants of the story, there had been a violent encounter between us, involving an iron, in Edinburgh's Balmoral Hotel. We had also supposedly set up a love nest, in a house in Bridge of Allan, that I had bought from Andy Murray's mum, Judy. Normally, I wouldn't have known nor cared about wild stories from the darker recesses of social media, and, if this one had stayed there, it would have been easy to ignore. But by late 2019 it was being openly talked about. My family and friends were being asked about it by people who'd heard it in their local pub. Colleagues were being asked about it on doorsteps. One of our neighbours in Glasgow mentioned it, obliquely, to Peter, presumably thinking he had a right to know that his wife was having an affair.
It reached a head in February 2020, when the social media site Guido Fawkes tweeted to the effect that a salacious story about my private life was only still secret because I had a superinjunction in place to stop it being reported. I was furious. It was a blatant lie. Not only was there no superinjunction in place, but such a legal remedy isn't even available in Scots law.
Shortly after, the all-consuming focus on Covid put a stop to the rumour, but only for a while. It would resurface a few months later. I had little option but to shrug it off, however irritating it might have been. Catherine, the French ambassador, helped. She was aware of the rumours too and, the first time I saw her after lockdown, at a meeting of EU ambassadors in the Scottish government's London office, we laughed about it. We were photographed together a couple of times after that, at Cop27 in Egypt, for example, and the online frenzy which ensued suggested that we had successfully trolled the trolls.
Although the French ambassador and I could laugh about it, a saga like this does throw up serious issues. How do fake stories like this take root in social media? Did some Russian bot factory concoct a made-up story? Who knows? Then, of course, there is the blatant homophobia at the heart of the 'story'. For many of those peddling it, 'lesbian' and 'gay' are meant as insults. However, while the fact I was being lied about got under my skin, the nature of the insult itself was water off a duck's back. Long-term relationships with men have accounted for more than thirty years of my life, but I have never considered sexuality, my own included, to be binary. Moreover, sexual relationships should be private matters.
© Nicola Sturgeon 2025. Extracted from Frankly by Nicola Sturgeon (Macmillan £28), published on Thursday. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.
Nicola Sturgeon discusses her memoir with Cathy Newman at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London SE1, on August 29; southbankcentre.co.uk