In her new memoir, Frankly, Nicola Sturgeon writes a great deal about her imposter syndrome. I had a similar feeling leading the former Scottish first minister down for an interview in the New Statesman Podcast studio this week, unfortunately located in the basement beside the damp towels of colleagues who had cycled into work.
What could I have to add to a conversation with someone whose political and personal life has been so exposed – by journalists and political opponents, elections and inquiries, Police Scotland and now the relentless promotional treadmill for the memoir itself? Scotland has become such a goldfish bowl for her that she’s even considering moving away for a while, possibly to London (Soho and Coal Drops Yard are her favourite places there to hang out, she told me).
For such a steadfast character – the winner of eight elections and longest-serving Scottish first minister at nearly a decade – her career has dramatically yoyoed.
Sexual assault claims by ten women led to a spectacular fallout with her predecessor and mentor Alex Salmond. The police investigation into the SNP’s finances, which resulted in her arrest (she has since been cleared), embezzlement charges against her now-former husband, and their family home plastered across the news as a crime scene, runs on.
The Scottish independence referendum of 2014 shattered a dream but cemented her place in history as Scotland’s first female leader. Her leadership during the pandemic – the envy of many piteous subjects of Boris Johnson south of the border at the time – resulted in tears and the need to seek therapy during the Covid inquiry years later.
The UK government blocked her attempt to introduce gender self-identification to Scotland. She believes she “lost the dressing room” when struggling to name the gender of a rapist, identifying as a woman, who was initially sent to a female prison. But still she remains an increasingly rare mainstream political voice standing up for trans rights.
Her shock resignation in 2023 left behind a country divided – on the independence question, gender debate, and the SNP’s domestic record – but her party has survived her departure and the police probe that followed. It again tops the polls. The latest shows Labour and Reform in joint second-place.
As Sturgeon, dressed almost entirely in poster-paint scarlet down to her nails, sat down in the studio, I started out by asking about these polls.
She reflected that Reform is “exploiting” a feeling in the UK that the country is “not working” and said left-wing parties needed to respond with a “better analysis”.
“I think what is needed in response to that from parties on the progressive left is a recognition of these problems, a recognition they need to be addressed, but a better analysis of the causes of the problems and better solutions than Nigel Farage and Reform are offering,” she said. “Nigel Farage wants everybody to believe that all of the ills of the country are down to immigrants and wokery, in summary, and that’s nonsense. The problems of the country probably date to the financial crash, exacerbated by Brexit, which Nigel Farage was one of the key drivers of.”
She described the SNP as “probably alone amongst mainstream parties in the UK in arguing the positive case for immigration”, and accused Keir Starmer of “legitimising Nigel Farage’s main argument” by “effectively saying, ‘yeah, we agree it’s all down to immigration, but trust us, we’ll deal with it better’.”
But there have been protests outside asylum hotels in Scotland, and – like their St George’s Cross counterparts down south – saltires are hanging on lampposts in parts of Scotland. Council workers tasked with taking them down in Aberdeenshire and Falkirk have faced intimidation from the public. For one of the nation’s best-known nationalists, this must cause some reflection. Sturgeon said it “took me aback” seeing saltires flying on a recent trip to Aberdeen, describing the sight as “something I’ve never really seen before”. The flag is, however, a vivid part of the SNP’s messaging.
“Look, I’ve stood in front of saltires, I’ve waved the saltire and I’m proud of the saltire,” she said. “I’m a patriotic Scot, but I also think we should get less worked up about flags. Flags are bits of fabric at the end of the day. They represent something about a country, but they don’t have personalities of their own.”
She drew a distinction between the SNP’s nationalism and the kind of nationalism that has dominated headlines over the summer. “The SNP is called the Scottish National Party, of course the Scottish independence movement is a nationalist movement, in the sense that we want independence,” she said. “But it’s not nationalist in the way that these nationalist movements that we see across the world are – or even the one Nigel Farage is leading”, she said, describing the SNP’s version as “a civic, inclusive, independent, self-government movement”.
In Frankly, Sturgeon describes the 2014 Scottish referendum campaign as a “positive” and “good-natured” contest. Others remember it differently. Online trolling became a mainstream concern. Nick Robinson, then BBC political editor, needed a bodyguard.
While Sturgeon praised the political engagement in the run-up to the vote – turnout ended up being 85 per cent – she did admit feeling “a bit ashamed that I didn’t think more about this during the referendum itself, and I should have understood it before this point, but I only really understood it at a visceral level during the Brexit campaign, standing to lose something that was important to me, European identity, citizenship… for people on the No side of the independence campaign, that’s how that felt.”
Perhaps just as divisive for some voters was Sturgeon’s attempt to pass a law allowing Scots to self-identify their gender. This was thwarted by the UK government, but deepened a rift in the Scottish left perhaps best symbolised by two of Scotland’s most prominent public figures and feminists: Sturgeon and the vocally gender-critical Harry Potter author JK Rowling.
In Frankly, Sturgeon describes Rowling’s decision to wear a t-shirt with the slogan “Nicola Sturgeon – destroyer of women’s rights” as a turning-point, making her feel “more at risk of possible physical harm”. In her review of the memoir on her website, Rowling wrote that her intention was to prompt journalists to ask Sturgeon questions about women’s safety, adding that she has never blamed Sturgeon for threats she’s herself received.
When I asked Sturgeon about this review, she said: “I don’t know where she gets the time! She is a highly successful woman. I’ve bought Harry Potter books for all the young people in my life, I think they’re great, but my goodness, where does she get the time to obsess about me? I hate to tell her that it’s just not reciprocated.”
She continued: “I don’t obsess about other individuals who happen to have a different view about me, they’re entitled to have a different view. There are some people in this life who, it strikes me often, spend an awful lot more time, like immeasurably so, thinking about me than I ever spend thinking about them.”
On the t-shirt, Sturgeon said: “She comes at this from a position of women’s safety, of a debate that she thinks has got too much abuse in it and everything. And yet, for somebody in her position, instead of trying to lower the temperature and ease the rhetoric, does something that is very much about doing the opposite and very personalised,” she said. “I don’t live on a yacht, I don’t live behind big security gates. I’m not surrounded by security.”
Will the two women ever come together to heal this split? “I think it looks really unlikely, but that’s not from my perspective,” Sturgeon replied. “Look, I have no great animus towards JK Rowling. I never have done. We disagreed vehemently on independence. She has a very different view to me on trans rights. She’s entitled to that. I wish she would argue her position without what appears to me sometimes indulging in a bit of gratuitous cruelty to trans people.”
You can listen to our whole conversation, which also covered Alex Salmond, the SNP’s domestic record and how she’d “never say never” to a political future, on the New Statesman Podcast.
[See also: Inside Labour’s deputy leadership election]
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