The rise and fall of Nicola Sturgeon

In February 1993, I was a guest on a Scottish sofa-chat television show about the awful Jamie Bulger tragedy in Liverpool. Our host was the eminent Donald MacCormick. Of other guests, I can only remember one. Perhaps it was the fishy surname, or the fact that she was already — but twenty-two — eminent in the Scottish National Party.

Pleasant. Even demure. Poised, shrewd-eyed — and formidable. I remember thinking, “Well, if this lass ever makes it in professional politics there’ll be no containing her.”

Never again did I meet Nicola Sturgeon when I was more famous than she was. In 1999, she entered the Scottish Parliament on the Glasgow regional-list. She would thereafter hammer away at the Glasgow Govan constituency till, at third asking, its Holyrood iteration fell whimpering into her arms.

By then she had, in 2004, bade for the SNP leadership. It went badly wrong: Roseanna Cunningham, MSP for Perth, was winning handily when Sturgeon cut a cynical deal with Alex Salmond, who had quit the SNP leadership only four years earlier.

At the last moment, Sturgeon refiled candidacy for the deputy leadership — too late for Cunningham, the incumbent, to mount a defence — and she and Salmond duly stormed home. As he was stuck in Westminster, till the 2007 election, she was effectively his representative on Earth.

On the SNP’s assumption of power, she became the confident Cabinet Secretary for Health, and in 2010 married Peter Murrell, the party’s Chief Executive since 2001. 

Health, either side the Tweed, has been the graveyard of many a political reputation. Not hers. Wholly across the detail, never bested in debate. Noting Sturgeon from afar, London journalist Suzanne Moore asked a mutual acquaintance what she was really like.

“You know how some people slam the door shut when they leave?” her friend shared in some awe. “When she comes into the room, she slams the door open …”

By 2014, she was in charge of the Yes campaign for the looming independence referendum, which Sturgeon declared a “once in a generation” opportunity. The Nationalists lost. Salmond stood down and in short order Nicola Sturgeon succeeded him. 

This took place unopposed. In the extraordinary Nationalist boom that followed, the Nationalists snatched fifty-six of Scotland’s fifty-nine Westminster divisions: the winners included Alex Salmond, thrilled to be back in the Commons.

All the while, of course — without Sturgeon’s knowledge and practically since their wedding — Peter Murrell was robbing the Scottish National Party blind.

Thus were sown the seeds for last week’s Shakespearean downfall.

An ambitious young woman who often worked 16-hour days — as First Minister, her official car picked her up from her Uddingston home on the dot at 5.30 am — and who, by 2007, was already deeply insecure about her ability to win elections.

A predecessor who had audaciously made a huge political comeback before, might well do so again — and that strange 2014 coronation.

No contest meant the Nationalists never had — and have still not had — a candid, unflinching debate as to why they had lost the referendum. Besides, if you might forgive the Americanism, coronated leaders tend to be bad news. Neville Chamberlain, Anthony Eden, Gordon Brown, Theresa May and Rishi Sunak — each was swept into 10 Downing Street by acclaim, and rank among the worst Prime Ministers of the last century.

As First Minister, Sturgeon — perky, relatable — became hugely popular. Everyone wanted a snap with her, to the point that Palace courtiers darkly dubbed her “Elsie McSelfie.” 

She had virtues practically unheard of in professional politics. She hated gossip and never briefed against colleagues. Adept on social media, she once sagely murmured that you should never, ever tweet after a glass of wine. 

Women loved how she had reinvented herself.  Softened her look. Binned the boxy trouser-suits, the manly block-heels, the Prisoner Cell Block H hair-don’t. A vision in tailored Totty Rocks red, she walked into Glasgow election-counts time and again like an exultant pair of scissors.

By the height of Covid, Nicola Sturgeon had been all but demotically canonised. By her 2023 resignation, she had led the SNP, incredibly, through eight straight wins in national elections. For two years, indeed, the bloc of SNP MPs actually held the balance of power at Westminster.

And she had nothing to show for it, as by her decree they shunned every opportunity to cut deals for ooh-look-at-me little games about Brexit.

In the spring of 2017, Sturgeon staked all on securing another independence referendum. It had been a brief generation. Westminster said no. Imprudently, she took the fight to the Supreme Court. In November 2022 — arguably, the beginning of the end — it ruled definitively that the Scottish Parliament does not have the power to legislate for a referendum on Scottish independence.

Actually, all the best arguments against Brexit are also pretty good arguments against independence

But what did Sturgeon actually mean by independence? Welded hip-and-thigh to somehow returning Scotland to the European Union, it made not the least sense. It would be no restoration of Scottish sovereignty. It needed the unanimous assent of all EU premiers – some of whom contend with secessionist movements of their own. It entailed, of necessity, customs-barriers and that against England — with whom Scotland does 60 per cent of her trade — and Brussels would demand that Scotland joined the Euro on terms of eye-watering fiscal reform.

Actually, all the best arguments against Brexit are also pretty good arguments against independence. But, even by the moment we quit the EU, in January 2020, Nicola Sturgeon — effectively running Scotland in a tiny cabal, viewing any dissent as an act of lèse-majesté — had already led her Nationalist tribe up its own bottom.

Blind spots had been evident for years. Sturgeon had no personal faith herself and could not comprehend people who did. When, late in Swinney’s leadership, it was decreed that all SNP Parliamentarians sacrifice a tenth of their salaries to Party funds, one MSP — Brian Adam, an estimable Mormon — protested. He already paid a tithe to his church. “You should get your priorities straight,” flared Sturgeon. 

When, in December 2014, Scotland legalised same-sex marriage, Sturgeon not only voted for it — she flew to the very first gay nuptials to be snapped, beaming in triumph, with the happy couple, as on all fronts social conservatives recoiled. Breaking, too, the long-held convention that SNP MPs do not vote on matters affecting only England and Wales, by her decree it was made known they would oppose any legislation to reverse the hunting ban. Later, SNP MPs would proudly force abortion on Northern Ireland, whether Northern Ireland wanted it or not.

Then there was all the energy wasted on Named Person legislation — a faintly Orwellian scheme, ostensibly for children’s welfare, widely perceived to bypass parental authority and as an assault on faith and family. £61 million later, not to mention £480,000 in legal costs, the plan was struck down by the Supreme Court. Other fiascos — the ferries debacle, the assaults on free speech even in the family home, her inept handling of Covid, and the final collapse of Sturgeon’s credibility over trans rights —-are already infamous.

Eight years as First Minister, eight thumping election wins, and what actually is the Sturgeon record? Save for the “baby box” — a stash of goodies handed every newly delivered Mum. (It includes a pack of condoms: psychologically, this First Minister had never left the student union.)

Two decades hence, what will her Wikipedia profile look like? Dominated, surely, by three things. Alex Salmond, her old friend and mentor: from an early stage in her role (and especially after he warned her firmly not to retain her husband as the SNP’s Chief Executive) she and Murrell seem to have lived in dread of yet another Mein Banff political comeback. 

In 2021 — and as is a matter of record — she was found to have misled the Scottish Parliament in her efforts to prevent it. Alex Salmond had been in March 2020 acquitted, in the High Court of Justiciary, of all charges laid against him.

Then there is Sturgeon’s sticky-fingered man, last week convicted of embezzling over £400,000 of SNP money on a host of goodies: a demented wedding-list rather adding to the gaiety of nations.

Finally, sealing her fate, is Sturgeon’s descent into transgender activism — even up to the point of defending male trans people being in women’s prisons.

Sturgeon has already made her excuses. Indeed, she has scarcely shut up — draping herself in the mantle of victimhood, wailing of misogyny, and even granting a sort of flailing Prince Andrew interview last weekend to the steely Laura Kuennsberg. Draped in pink, sometimes near tears, the former First Minister put you increasingly in mind of a melting strawberry ice.

Given their high salaries and her ridiculous working-hours, I can believe Sturgeon genuinely did not know her husband was looting their party.

But, as leader of that party, her fiduciary duties included ultimate responsibility for its finances — and, from October 2020, and then a rake of resignations, Sturgeon was warned time and again that something was odd and should be investigated. As is amply documented, she contemptuously dismissed all concerns.

I struggle, too, with the woman-wronged self-pity or such laboured lines as her County Kerry sob, last Friday, that she was still “coming to terms with being married to someone I did not know.” 

It sounds like a line straight from Val McDermid (come to think of it, it probably was; they are great friends). And highlights the obvious — that Nicola Sturgeon has still not processed what has happened, nor come to terms with it. Till she does, she should shut up.

The sustained gabbiness has only made her central to a scandal in which, on the day of her estranged husband’s conviction, she was actually peripheral. As they say in politics, when you’re explaining, you’re losing.

Sturgeon herself did not hesitate to slight, slam, marginalise and (insofar as it was in her power) destroy quite a lot of women

There is a still bigger hazard in playing the misogyny card. At the top of her game — and once her fixation on transgenderism as the civil rights issue de nos jours took hold — Sturgeon herself did not hesitate to slight, slam, marginalise and (insofar as it was in her power) destroy quite a lot of women. 

Roseanna Cunningham, Joan McAlpine, Joanna Cherry — the bodies are everywhere. Those who disagreed with the First Minister — about, for instance, a biological man running a rape crisis centre — were slammed as “deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well.” 

Sturgeon bewailed the “toxicity” of the debate, though she had made not the least effort to secure public consent. Footage of her instant, gleeful reaction to Jo Swinson’s 2019 East Dunbartonshire humiliation was genuinely disturbing.

In her last stand, as the pillars of the temple tumbled all around her, Nicola Sturgeon could still not admit that the sometime Adam Graham, 31, now a convicted rapist doing stir at the woman-only HMP Cornton Vale and calling herself Isla Bryson, was actually a man. (“She regards herself as a woman. I regard the individual as a rapist …”)

Sturgeon was but twenty-one when, in 1992, she contested Glasgow Shettleston. It is imprudent to pursue a political career that young. 

To fall like Icarus … In Charles Kennedy’s case it ended in tragedy. In hers, it denied her broader life-experience and vital hinterland. Last week, I wondered if Nicola Sturgeon realised what she was saying. Increasingly, I wonder if she knows who she is.