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Spectator

Top five lowlights from Sturgeon's memoir

They say good things come to those who wait, but Steerpike will let readers be the judge of that when it comes to Nicola Sturgeon's memoir Frankly. The 450-page account by Scotland's former first minister was supposed to be hitting bookshelves on Thursday, but some shops decided to release it ahead of time and Mr S has got his hands on an early copy, reading it so you don't have to. Here are the top lowlights from Sturgeon's new tome… Trans U-turn One of the controversies that, some suggest, prompted her resignation in 2023 was the gender reform bill – and the scandal of double rapist Isla Bryson being housed in a women's prison. The question of whether Bryson is a man or a woman proved rather difficult for the then-first minister to answer at the time – and Sturgeon still hasn't managed to square this circle, pointedly calling the rapist 'they' in an ITV interview last night. At the time, Sturgeon first voted down Tory MSP Russell Findlay's amendment to ban sex offenders from obtaining a gender recognition certificate and later voted against SNP MSP Michelle Thomson's amendment to pause applications by those charged with rape or sexual assault. While she dismissed concerns from the bill's critics then, now Sturgeon admits in her book: 'The question I ask myself most when I reflect on this period is whether I should have hit the pause button when I realised, sometime in 2022, just how polarised the issue was becoming. With hindsight I wish I had.' Too little, too late… Salmond fallout Sturgeon's infamous fallout with her political mentor and boss Alex Salmond has had books written about it – and so of course the ex-FM had to include at least a nod to it in her own. But she hasn't held back. She broke down in tears when her colleague Ian Blackford told her Salmond had passed away in October 2024 and confessed she wondered whether she should cut the chapter on him from her book. 'Would I just be stirring up pain for his wife and family (which I truly don't want to do)?' she pondered. Regardless, she went and published it anyway. Charming! Sturgeon claimed that the former SNP leader hadn't read the independence white paper, accused him of undermining John Swinney during the latter's first attempt at leading the SNP and alleged he had planted questions via opposition MSPs on the committee assessing the Scottish government's handling of harassment complaints. In short, despite her claims of grief on hearing of her former boss's passing, the SNP's Dear Leader decided to pull no punches. 'I have tried not to rewrite history,' she begins the chapter, later adding: '[Alex] was trying to rewrite history.' Talk about tit for tat! Cross-party politics Scotland's former FM has long been accused of creating a divisive political culture over both independence and the trans debate. Yet in her memoir she claims that her motivation for a deal with the Scottish Greens after falling short of a majority in the 2021 Holyrood election was down to her desire to 'champion a more constructive style of politics'. Er, right. She goes on: At the tail end of the last parliament, embroiled in the Salmond saga and worn down by Covid, I had become weary of the opportunism and perpetual game-playing of opposition parties. It was partly a result of electoral frustration, but they had become impervious to any attempts to build cross-party consensus. And this is the woman lauded for her high emotional intelligence?! Brexit The Queen of the Nats wouldn't ever exploit a democratic result for her own political gain, would she? Not according to her memoir, anyway, in which she writes that, after Britain voted to leave the EU: The established narrative now, though, is that I went hell for leather for a second referendum immediately after the Brexit vote. It isn't true. On the contrary, I spent the next nine months doing the precise opposite. I tried hard to persuade the UK government to pursue a compromise option… It was in good faith, therefore, that we published 'Scotland's Place in Europe' in December 2016, mapping out what a different outcome for Scotland might look like and how it could be achieved. I was explicit that this was a solution for Scotland within the UK; in other words, an alternative to independence. It seems rather odd, then, that in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, Sturgeon told a journalist that the chance of another independence referendum was 'highly likely'. And since then, the SNP has consistently stood on a platform that advocates for closer ties with the EU – if not rejoining the European Union altogether. How very interesting… London The SNP's Dear Leader has spent most of her life calling for Scotland's independence from the United Kingdom – but in a rather amusing revelation, it doesn't seem like she wants to practice what she preaches. In her book, she writes: 'I am determined to see more of the world. I might live outside of Scotland for a period.' In fact, she has since admitted to both the Sunday Times and the BBC that: 'I love London.' Just one of those nationalists who'll do anything for their country but live in it, eh?