3 days ago
Let's not rewrite history: Nicola Sturgeon was a truly dire politician
Isn't it time to put the legend of 'Sturgeon the Magnificent' back in its box as we await publication on Thursday of her book Frankly. She's having a rare old time, much better than she'd ever achieved when she was something… you know like First Minister of Scotland.
Leaving aside all that gender stuff which she got completely wrong right from the start and which proved to even her most ardent fans that she was, well, nuts in thinking that a woman with a penis guilty of rape should go to a woman's prison.
Oh yes, and there was that other stuff which some people might remember such as the battle she and her former mentor turned deadly enemy, Alex Salmond, fought over who was conspiring against whom about claims of sexual assaults against staff.
Yet, still the idea seems to have grown legs that she was some kind of wonderful politician – a veritable genius who showed that even when in charge of a country with only five million souls doing the right thing by those people gets you a place on the international stage. The trouble is that Sturgeon seldom did the right thing.
Her reputation has grown like Topsy even before her book was even written, never mind published. So much so that she was compared in the S unday Times magazine as 'Britain's most successful female politician since Margaret Thatcher'. I'm bound to confess that I had to read that more than a few times… but on each occasion I concluded that this was a nonsense verdict with no basis in fact as history has shown and is still showing.
The plain fact is that Nicola Sturgeon was an extremely poor politician. Oh yes, she was a pretty good debater, well able to best many of her opponents, and was a more than decent public speaker, if you like your tub to be thumped. However, there's a whole host of Glasgow University graduates – as she is – including two ex-prime ministers and several very able MPs, a famous journalist and – I didn't know this – an Archbishop of Canterbury who could claim those attributes.
But to be a good politician requires more than debating and speaking skills. Judgment is what's required, specifically about policies and on these she was nigh-on useless.
Think of the gender row she began and continues to fight; of the stupid coalition deal she struck with the Marxist Greens; of the plan to ban all new North Sea oil and gas development; of the multi-million pound ferries debacle; of the record drug deaths; of poorest kids failing in schools; her total shut down policy during the Covid pandemic. All of these issues and others brought the SNP to its knees in last year's election and her current successor spends most of his time trying to undo the damage she caused. She'd retired by then but she nearly killed her party in absentia.
Given all these failures, how is it that a book she's written is getting pretty fair and positive licks in the media. How come? One reason for this adulation is that she long ago completely conned a large part of the Fleet Street commentariat. She knew they wouldn't know all the details of her stuff and wouldn't bother trying to find out, either, and so she skated through their questions with a smile on her face.
They admired her then and still do because she launched a determined and successful campaign to court them. She was all over them like a cheap suit when there was a press conference attended by London journalists. They hung on her every word and one has even asked her about her tattoo.
I've known her for longer than most – for a quarter of a century in fact. A colleague and myself helped her and Peter Murrell, her estranged husband, celebrate their marriage with a bottle of champagne in a Perth restaurant several years ago. She has many good qualities… a wicked sense of humour among them and she also knows her way around a wine list, displaying much better taste than Alex Salmond.
However, it's her gallus nature – Scots for chutzpah – much more than political judgment that's got her to where she is today.
