5 days ago
STEPHEN DAISLEY: All the selfies in the world can't hide Sturgeon's lack of substance
Nicola Sturgeon is a creature of Scotland's elites, and those elites are going out of their way to promote her memoirs.
The latest boost came via an Edinburgh Book Festival chit chat with Kirsty Wark. Wark has a talent for dismantling an interviewee's credibility by repeating their own words back to them in a flat tone of Sahara-dry scepticism.
It's a subtle technique that can be devastating when deployed against a dissembling minister or public official.
And while she honed her interrogative gifts on Sturgeon once or twice during their hour-long exchange, it wasn't Sturgeon she wanted in front of her but Alex Salmond, a former nemesis of both women.
Recounting how Salmond had brought Sturgeon on board as a candidate in 1992, contending that 'he needed you to change the proposition of the SNP; you were the chosen one', Wark ventured that there was 'almost a thread of coercive control from Alex Salmond in this book'.
Wowzers. Where did that come from? Sturgeon said she wouldn't use that term, telling the audience that Salmond helped her build up her confidence.
Still, she had plenty else to say about him, including her assertion that 'Alec didn't want to see the SNP succeed without him'. She certainly put his fears to rest.
Wark pressed her on the failure to eliminate the attainment gap, as promised. Sturgeon put this down to 'a lack of appreciation' on her part of the role played by poverty. This was a telling admission and called for more probing than it received.
While Sturgeon was no doubt attempting to shift the blame to Westminster austerity, she revealed herself as the sort of first minister who would make a landmark policy pledge without doing sufficient research to grasp that poverty was the principal driver of the poverty-related attainment gap.
We knew Sturgeon governed in headlines, but she appears not to have read beyond them.
Wark began to rhyme off some of the many failings in Scottish education when a baby cried out in the audience.
'It'll be all right. When you come around,' she said, softly.
Sturgeon dug her heels in, insisting the educational benefits of the Scottish Child Payment would be seen in another ten years. Thus did 'judge me on my record' become 'judge me on my long-term predictions'.
We are witnessing a cynical media campaign to invent a legacy for a middling politician who spent nearly two decades at or near the very top of government and has almost nothing to show for it. What exactly did she do to merit a written account of her political life?
Asked by Wark to list her achievements, she managed the baby box and the Scottish Child Payment. That's barely enough for a book jacket, let alone a book. Then again, she did manage to pen a memoir despite her well-documented memory problems. That's no small feat.
She evidently objects to this line of enquiry, since she reminded Wark that she 'had to fight eight elections' during her time in Bute House. While it's unfortunate that her political career was interrupted so often by democracy, Sturgeon has yet to say what she'd have done if the ballot box had been cleared from her path.
I suspect the answer is: not much. Policy is hard, much harder than politics. All the selfies in the world won't change a single stubborn outcome. Sturgeon wasn't hindered on policy by unfortunately timed elections. She was inconsequential because she is insubstantial.
An insight into her mindset came when the topic turned to trans rights. We heard, once again, that 'this whole issue has been hijacked and weaponised by people who are transphobic and homophobic and racist'.
Sturgeon shared some of the repugnant posts about her on social media from gender-critical feminists, including mockery of her miscarriage and hopes that she is raped in a public toilet. Despicable stuff, and when Wark suggested these were the extremes, she shot back: 'I don't think that is just at the extreme.'
Sturgeon offered no evidence for this assessment, then went on to dismiss the suggestion that trans rights were incompatible with women's rights, saying: 'You don't tar the entire group with the bad people.'
The two statements were no more than a few minutes apart, and yet she appeared blissfully unaware of their obvious contradiction.
It wasn't the elections that were holding her back.
