Nicola Sturgeon has no shortage of critics. Since the latter period of her almost decade-long spell as Scotland’s first minister, which began as long ago as 2014, judgement has been regularly and freely cast, particularly in the two years since she stepped down. It has, more often than not, found her wanting: for her slim track record in office, as a controlling boss, as a leader who failed on too many fronts. On her own side of the constitutional debate, she is regarded by some as the woman who blew any chance of securing independence.
Frankly – a memoir – is not quite her revenge, but it is a determined and self-excavating effort to explain herself. “The fact is I am neither the hero that my most ardent supporters revere, nor the villain that my fiercest critics revile,” she writes. The book reveals something more than that – a bruised, tormented soul, who disappeared into politics at a tender age and struggled to find an identity outside of it, a superstar frontwoman who persistently wrestled with self-doubt.
This isn’t quite a misery memoir, though at times it feels that way. This is no surprise given the trying circumstances in which it was written. There is much end-of-day weeping over glasses of wine as she tries to cope with the brutality and frustrations of political life and the complexity of her private existence.
But Frankly also tells the impressive story of a working-class girl who climbed all the way to the top, on her own terms, who dominated her nation for the best part of a decade and became an international figure. At the height of her popularity, Sturgeon enjoyed an unprecedentedly strong and intimate bond with many Scots – they saw themselves reflected in the apparent ordinariness of “our Nicola”. She is far from ordinary, revealing herself over more than 400 intense pages. A lifelong battle with shyness and impostor syndrome coexists with an indomitable drive to succeed. As a child, she was bookish and withdrawn. But “alongside shyness, a crippling lack of confidence and a dreadful fear of failure,” Sturgeon writes, she also had “a very strong sense of ‘destiny’; a feeling that whatever I did in life would not be ‘ordinary’, that it would attract attention.”
Born in 1970, the future leader of the SNP grew up in Dreghorn, an Ayrshire village that had long subsisted on coal mining. Her outlook was formed, as with so many of her generation, by the impact of Thatcherite industrial reforms on her community. Mass unemployment and a widespread absence of hope persuaded young Sturgeon that the only way for Scotland to protect itself was to become independent, to rid itself of unsympathetic Tory governments and English-dominated decision-making in the UK. Labour, the only Westminster alternative, was shifting rightwards under Neil Kinnock, which cemented her opposition to the London establishment.
From the 1980s, the SNP was moving away from its old “Tartan Tories” reputation under a new generation of left-wingers. Most prominent was a gifted young MP called Alex Salmond. It was here Sturgeon found her “destiny”, the home and the cause that would define her life. The ouroboros-like relationship between Salmond and Sturgeon sits at the heart of this book. He was her mentor, promoting her time and again. They worked closely together as the SNP rose, even if the bond was one of convenience. If she found his titanic ego and alpha-male approach infuriating, she also appreciated his strategic brilliance. Only when Sturgeon succeeded Salmond as first minister, after loss in the independence referendum of 2014, did this “dream team” shatter.
Allegations of Salmond’s sexual impropriety, starting in 2018, were the final straw. Though he was cleared in court of the charges against him, he blamed his former protégé for plotting to ruin his reputation. Some in the independence movement still believe this. But Sturgeon argues Salmond was no victim of conspiracy, with her critics unable to “produce a shred of hard evidence that he was”. Worse: “In the course of his trial, and in what he told me face to face, Alex admitted that he had acted towards women in ways that weren’t always acceptable,” Sturgeon recounts. “What unfolded was firmly rooted in his own conduct.” Salmond’s anger towards her was, she says, based on her refusal to block the investigation into his behaviour. This “would have been a betrayal of the women concerned and, in some ways, of all women,” she writes, “proof – yet again – that powerful men with powerful connections can get away with anything.”
The loss of this friendship led to what Sturgeon describes as “a grieving process”. On Salmond’s sudden death last year during a speaking engagement in North Macedonia, she went through it all again. “I was hit by a wave of emotion much stronger than I would have anticipated,” she writes. “Part of me still misses him, or at least misses the man I thought he was and the relationship we once had.” Ultimately, though, her judgement is that “he died without reckoning with himself”.
This is a memoir whose strength lies in its author’s relentless reckoning with herself. Through her eight years as first minister, Sturgeon pursued a progressive agenda that sought to shape Scotland as a distinctively liberal, empathetic nation. The fact that Scotland, outside of her own political echo chamber, is no such thing never seems to have occurred to her. With her attentions elsewhere, Sturgeon failed to make much progress in office, whether in reforming public services or in growing the economy. But she is open enough to probe her mistakes, to question her decisions.
Her finest, and most challenging, moment came with Covid. She gave it everything, sleeping only a few hours each night, living on flasks of soup provided by a friend and “in a permanent state of nervous tension”. Sturgeon’s daily televised briefings throughout the pandemic, where she was honest about what the government did and did not know, and why it was restricting people’s liberty, were a reassurance to those who tuned in. “I am still haunted by the impact of the decisions I took and those I didn’t take,” she says.
Famously, she broke down on the witness stand during her evidence to the Covid inquiry: “I hadn’t properly considered the emotional impact of being confronted with everything my worst critics wanted people to believe of me. That in managing Covid, I was politically motivated. That I had acted in bad faith. That I hadn’t been transparent. That I was a control freak.”
Whether or not “control freak” is putting it too strongly, Sturgeon inarguably ran her government with the tightest of grips. Her ministers were not allowed much freedom of thought or leeway. The girl who swotted her way through school, who always tried to know more about everything than anyone else, was still present in the adult. It is here that comparisons with Margaret Thatcher find a justified echo: a woman in what was largely still a male-dominated climate, she felt judged more harshly than if she had been of the opposite sex. This may go some way towards explaining the defensive brittleness and the punchy aggression that occasionally surfaced and that led to the “nippy sweetie” nickname; she was protecting herself.
As her ministry aged, there was another possible comparison to Thatcher. Criticisms and scandals accumulated, and Sturgeon’s circle of trust shrank. She began to rely more heavily on her own instincts – the classic mistake made by long-servers who come to view themselves as untouchable. Sturgeon speaks of emotional intelligence as the most important quality in any leader, but towards the end of her tenure this seems to have deserted her entirely. Fatally, she was unable to see the other side of any argument.
Which bring us to gender reform, the policy that played a key role in her downfall. It was here that Sturgeon, ran into an opponent she could not defeat: her fellow women. Though she paints herself as a passionate feminist throughout this book, her reputation among many today is that of someone who has betrayed her sex. When confronted with the case of the convicted rapist Isla Bryson, a transgender woman who had been sent to a women-only prison, Sturgeon was unable to say whether Bryson was a man or a woman. Her dismissal of gender-critical feminists as bigots and transphobes was foolish, leading to JK Rowling appearing in a T-shirt with the legend “Nicola Sturgeon – destroyer of women’s rights”. It set the scene for a pitched battle that continues today.
For all the damage done to the trans cause by her handling of the affair, Sturgeon believes she was in the right, even if she “lost the dressing room”. She admits that “there are things I would certainly try to do better”, and accepts it might have been wise to “hit the pause button”. But she isn’t one to back down. “Those who subjected me to this level of hatred and misogynistic abuse often claimed to be doing so in the interests of women’s safety… Nothing feels further from the truth,” she insists. “One day we will look back on this period in history and be collectively horrified at the vilification trans people have been subjected to.”
As the politics became ever harder, Sturgeon’s personal life was dragged into the muck. A police investigation into alleged misuse of SNP funds led to not only her arrest but that of her husband, the then SNP chief executive, Peter Murrell. With a crime-scene tent set up in her garden, which “looked more like a murder scene than the place of safety it had always been for me”, she was forced to flee to her parents’ house and then to a friend’s in north-east Scotland. She came close to a mental breakdown. Though she was eventually cleared, Murrell faces charges of embezzlement. The pressure from the scandal led to the couple’s separation.
From the heights of power to the trough of despair, the mighty had fallen. Her relentless attempts to secure a second independence referendum had amounted to naught. Exhausted and conscious of just how divisive a figure she had become, Sturgeon stepped down as first minister in 2023. She was at her lowest, and any prospect of a glittering subsequent career – it had been mooted that she might work for the UN on climate change or child poverty – had been destroyed by scandal.
In the final pages, following so much catharsis, hope finally enters the picture. “The process of writing this book has helped me arrive at a more balanced sense of myself,” she says. She now spends time with friends and family, reads her beloved novels whenever she feels like it, writes literary criticism – including for the New Statesman – and is considering authoring a crime novel of her own. She even got herself a tattoo. “I am living in the moment in a way I have never managed to do before. As a result, and in spite of everything, I am probably happier now than I have ever been.”
One wonders whether, given her complex temperament, Sturgeon might have enjoyed life more had she steered clear of politics. But her will to power was too great. She was all in, charismatic yet divisive, sometimes arrogant but an incurable introvert. She left a legacy that will be debated for years to come. She has given us the rawest possible account of a remarkable but painful journey. Only her harshest antagonists will begrudge her the happiness she has found at last.
Nicola Sturgeon will be appearing at the Cambridge Literary Festival on Sunday 23 November
Frankly
Nicola Sturgeon
Pan Macmillan 480pp, £28
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[See also: Nigel Farage’s Trump-Vance delusion]
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This article appears in the 27 Aug 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Gentle Parent Trap