The recent two-part documentary aired by the BBC Salmond And Sturgeon: A Troubled Union may give the two former leaders of the Scottish National Party equal billing, it may cut between the two heavyweight figures of Scottish — indeed, UK — politics fairly evenly but, make no mistake, the narrative is driven by Nicola Sturgeon’s perspective. 

Alex Salmond denounced the documentary barely moments after it finished airing in a furious thread on X, apparently under the impression he had been partaking in a film about the history of the SNP, rather than what he viewed as a “psychodrama” effectively framing him and Sturgeon as the political equivalent of Bette Davies and Joan Crawford in Feud. The film does spend a bit of time in the first episode on his more-than-slightly-impressive rise to political stardom in 1987 and leadership influence over the party, transforming its image from being fringe — and although the documentary doesn’t explicitly state it, weird and embarrassing — and paving its way to becoming, the third-largest party in Britain in 2015, used in Conservative campaign materials for fear of its supposed power. 

In the second episode though, things take a startlingly biased turn against Salmond. There are egregious omissions of Sturgeon’s scandals and failures. The only real error acknowledged throughout Sturgeon’s leadership is her trying to force a second referendum after the Brexit vote, and even then the tone is a bit “whoops-a-daisy”. Salmond is notoriously a man of ego, even for a politician — it’s palpable through the screen whenever he’s talking. He was always liable to receive the documentary poorly for being anything less than a love song to the SNP. That said, he is justified in being outraged that the party’s dive in popularity is implicitly put down entirely to his trial for sexual misconduct — accusations of which he was cleared on all counts — and the subsequent divides it caused between Team Alex and Team Nicola within the SNP. No mention of the ferry fiasco, or Sturgeon’s and her husband Peter Murrell’s arrest over alleged finance misdealings, or the mortifying picture of a police forensic tent in their front garden. Needless to say, the disastrous, now overturned, Gender Recognition Reform bill doesn’t get a look in. The disasters exposed around Edinburgh Rape Crisis centre and its CEO Mridul Wadhwa (who has only just stepped down) are largely a consequence of Sturgeon’s government erasing the importance of sex in law. Omitting the damage the GRR had on public trust of her has more than a whiff of cynicism.

I see your “Teflon Tony Blair” and raise you “Sleekit Sturgeon” (“Sleekit” is Scots for being artfully ingratiating)

The documentary then, especially in the second episode, is better viewed as an unintentional insight into Sturgeon’s ability to warp history in her favour. I see your “Teflon Tony Blair” and raise you “Sleekit Sturgeon” (“Sleekit” is Scots for being artfully ingratiating). Sturgeon’s performance in this film is yet another masterclass — dressed in a silky pure white blouse, tired-eyed but well made-up, professional yet approachable, steady-voiced; every inflection robotically conveying a pitch perfect note of regret, reflectiveness and righteous disappointment.  

An overlooked part of Sturgeon’s image is that so much of its success is due to who she was not, rather than who she is. What motivated her to join the SNP at the tender age of sixteen was her opposition to Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher’s accomplishment as being the first female Prime Minister is seldom touted as a feminist victory, and this made a very handy juxtaposition for Sturgeon’s glass-ceiling victory as First Minister of Scotland, who crowed her “feminist to her fingertips” credentials at every opportunity. 

After the Brexit vote, she could be the sparky Chief Mammy, demanding a second referendum in the name of Scottish civic pro-European nationalism, contrasted with Theresa May’s charisma-deficient spell as Prime Minister, trying and failing to inspire unity amongst a public locked in ideological warfare over inward-looking English British nationalism. During the Covid crisis, she was handed a gift in the form of Boris Johnson, whose poor handling of the lockdown and betrayals of public trust (in the eyes of every political stripe) made Sturgeon glow with Churchillian statesmanship that distracted focus from the cock-up in Scottish nursing homes. Many of her ardent admirers, lest we forget, transcended Scottish independence supporters to left-leaning unionists and, especially post-Brexit, English and Welsh progressives. Indeed, I daresay a significant readership portion of her upcoming memoirs will be lefty cosmopolitans south of the border, maybe even more so than Scots.

A very significant moment in the documentary, despite its being hurried over, is when former MSP Roseanne Cunningham says tentatively of Sturgeon’s stepping up after Salmond stepped down in 2014: “Most of us, I think, would have been curious as to what kind of leader [Sturgeon] would be. It would have been difficult to have predicted Nicola the ‘rock star’ that we got.”

It certainly would. For most people, Salmond’s deputy was a serious-faced but relatively nondescript figure, a perfect blank slate onto which independence supporters disillusioned in loss could project what they most needed: hope.  It’s hard to exaggerate the rawness of wounds after the YES campaign failed to convince a majority in 2014. There was fury, denial, bewilderment and a general hopeless sense of “Well, what next?”. To paraphrase one of my favourite Homer Simpson quotes — “Marge, it takes two to lie, one to lie and one to listen”. It takes a willing congregation to anoint a false prophet. And post-referendum, independence voters, whether newly-awakened to the cause or dyed-in-the-wool nationalists, needed one. Nicola the Rock Star was a 3D hologram beamed out by her needful public’s eyes more than she was created by her political team — they simply took the mold and ran with it.

This illusion remains to this day, lingering in the lighting of her face throughout the documentary, a slightly aged star gracious in the dwindling of her power. But this deceptive glow will eventually snuff out (perhaps sooner rather than later, depending on how the ongoing police investigation into she and Murrell’s handling of party finances concludes). 

So what next? Sturgeon mania have been misguided or even delusional but it ignited a sense of hope and identity that other Scottish parties have failed to inspire. Unionists will insist — not necessarily wrongly — that this so-called “hope” was always toxic, rooted in vapid nationalism. Gloating at the frustration and bafflement of Sturgeon followers as they grapple with their prophet’s fall is ill-advised though. That her successor Humza Yousaf’s brief, dismal reign as First Minister and John Swinney’s current scrabble for damage control has lowered nationalist morale further shouldn’t be celebrated too soon either. Sneering at and ignoring the pain of those on the losing side was the mistake made by too many after the 2014 referendum. If the Scottish Tories or Labour party want the disillusioned public not to flock to a new ideological church or lose faith altogether, they must offer them something more solid than Sturgeonism to place hope in.