Sturgeon's memoirs: The book that has got everyone in Scottish politics talking

ITV News

a day ago

A little more than a decade ago, I watched Nicola Sturgeon headline a venue usually reserved for rock bands.
Working for The Courier newspaper at the time, I saw the then soon-to-be first minister provoke rapturous applause from a sold out Caird Hall in Dundee.
Like a gig, there was merchandise. T-shirts made to look like vintage Scotland football tops with ' Sturgeon 15' on the back.
Yet this was all just part of the warm up for her being the star attraction for a sold-out show in Glasgow's vast Hydro arena.
She seemed untouchable. Even many of her opponents admired her. So why is she now one of the most divisive politicians in the country?
The answer to that is in part answered by the content – and the reaction to it – that has been serialised in her upcoming memoirs.
The book is called Frankly. Given the top-down, secretive approach Sturgeon's critics say she took to government, that alone has drawn some mirth amongst Holyrood mischief makers.
Remember the furore about her deleting all of her WhatsApp messages from during the pandemic?
In 2019, I revealed in The Times, to much consternation from her allies, that Sturgeon had been using an SNP email address for government business.
At the time concerns were raised that officials might have been using private emails and social media accounts to avoid scrutiny and circumvent freedom of information requests.
Official documents had to be dragged from the Scottish government like blood from a stone when a Holyrood committee was investigating the unlawful handling of sexual misconduct allegations against her predecessor Alex Salmond.
Salmond, who died last year, was cleared in court of any criminal activity and claimed there was a conspiracy orchestrated against him by Sturgeon and people close to her.
In extracts of the book released in the Sunday Times, Sturgeon calls this 'a fabrication, the invention of a man who wasn't prepared to reflect honestly on his own conduct'.
She also floated the theory that Salmond himself leaked the allegations to the Daily Record so he could play the victim card.
Unsurprisingly, this latest twist in the falling out of two of the UK's biggest politicians of the last 20 years has both reignited Scottish politics' very own Greek tragedy onto the front page of the papers and enraged Salmond's allies.
It also appears to be, charitably, a stretch. As a declaration of interest, I wrote a book about the Salmond/Sturgeon fallout with David Clegg, who broke that story in the Daily Record.
His account of how he received the document outlining the complaint against Salmond – it was delivered anonymously to the newspaper's office – is set out in Break-Up and on quite a few occasions we have speculated between ourselves about who might have sent it.
We have our suspicions but the truth is that only the sender and anyone they told will know for sure who was behind the leak.
It sums up a lot of the criticism of Sturgeon, particularly in recent years: great at garnering headlines, especially when it involves undermining an opponent, not very much of substance beyond that.
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Her allies would of course dispute that assessment.
They would correctly be able to point to a series of election wins that surpass her peers; they would highlight policies like the Scottish child payment, which is widely seen as helping the poorest kids in society; they would say that just having a strong, impressive female leader with some of the best communications skills in politics is important to show women they can break the glass-ceiling.
This may be true but plenty of promises lay broken.
The attainment gap between the richest and poorest pupils has barely budged despite Sturgeon's promises; NHS waiting lists including those in the Borders and Dumfries and Galloway continue to be too long by ministers own admission; for independence supporters there has been no move on the constitutional question; rural Scotland has felt like an afterthought to an Edinburgh-based government that has often felt increasingly central belt focused; and a new culture war has opened over people's gender.
In her interview with ITV, Sturgeon admitted to some blame for the latter but still floundered when asked about Isla Bryson, the rapist who self-identified as female and was transferred to a women's prison.
It is possible that the most revealing piece of information to have emerged from all the book extracts and interviews so far is Sturgeon saying he has "always loved London' as she teased the potential for a move to the city that has often been shorthand for everything the SNP sees wrong with the United Kingdom.
Perhaps Frankly will prove to be insightful and revealing. Right now it looks like one final defence of the years that followed Nicola Sturgeon's glory days.
Years that Scotland has largely moved on from.