
The world of Scottish politics awaits Nicola Sturgeon’s forthcoming autobiography with a kind of agog fascination, but also with some trepidation.
The former first minister is due to publish her memoir later this year – but what kind of book will it be? There are various templates for these things: in A Journey, Tony Blair delivered a thoughtful self-examination that sought honestly to address his mistakes as well as his successes; Margaret Thatcher’s effort was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a much drier and humour-free affair; Liz Truss and Boris Johnson produced wearying attempts at self-justification and score-settling.
Sturgeon is a bookworm (she is an able occasional reviewer for the New Statesman) and an admirer of good writing. Her passion for novels suggests a longing to get under the skin of the world, to understand what makes people tick. This might give her future readers cause for optimism.
However, she has hardly been a model of self-reflection since leaving office. Perhaps it’s all just a bit too soon, but Sturgeon has seemed prickly and overly defensive whenever she’s been challenged on her record. There hasn’t been much admission, so far, that not everything went to plan, or that she left the SNP in a sorry state upon her resignation as leader in 2023.
But then she’s hardly had an easy time of it. Operation Branchform, the police investigation into alleged misuse of SNP funds, which saw her arrested, questioned and then released without charge, continues. Her husband, the former party chief executive Peter Murrell, from whom she this week announced her separation, has been charged with embezzlement. All this has hung over the former FM, and the movement she once led, like a dark cloud.
Nor have critics been generous about her legacy. Despite a decade of dominance, with the opposition trounced in every election she faced, the achievements are undeniably on the thin side. While the person was impressive, the policies were often less so. In her final years as first minister, especially, it seemed like each new proposal collapsed upon contact with the real world, whether gender reforms, or sweeping environmental measures, or the many other heavy-handed state interventions that were launched under her watch. She must, fairly, take most of the blame for this – Sturgeon was a controlling leader who gave little freedom of movement or thought to her ministers. Her decision to agree a deal with the hard-line Scottish Greens in 2021 ensured she was pulled ever leftwards, to little good effect.
And on independence, the central cause of the SNP, she was an obsessive campaigner who arguably did more harm than good. The relentless pursuit of a second referendum did not bear fruit, and her sudden shift to using a general election as a “de facto” plebiscite played badly with voters, and indeed with her own party. In her aftermath, the Nats were a much diminished force. Humza Yousaf, Sturgeon’s essentially hand-picked replacement, was not up to the job and gone within a year. Her brutal falling out with Alex Salmond was constantly in the media.
For these reasons, the past few years cannot have been easy. Many had thought that the post-Bute House Sturgeon would sail into an international job, perhaps working with the UN on climate change or one of the other causes that she cares about, but the funding scandal has put paid to that, for now at least.
Denied that second act, Sturgeon has tried to enjoy herself and, in her own words, spend time rediscovering “Nicola Sturgeon the human being”. In an interview with the FT at the weekend, she said that she “probably hadn’t been alone in a public place for ten years. You have to relearn how to live.” Despite her troubles, her friends talk of someone from whom a heavy burden has clearly been lifted – she is good fun in the pub, they say. She has become a regular host at book festivals, and remains an MSP for now. It must have taken a particular strength of character to remain in the public eye through a torrid personal and professional period. She has not gone away; she has not hidden.
We will learn more about all of this from her memoir, no doubt. The question is whether the book will do anything to restore her reputation or simply be a self-justifying, score-settling missed opportunity. In the FT, she said she took “a fair chunk of responsibility” for the SNP’s calamitous performance in last year’s general election, but then came the defence. “The more time that passes, I think it’s harder to keep blaming me for things… the SNP didn’t lose an election when I was leader, but somehow the first one that they lost when I wasn’t leader was all my fault.”
This doesn’t sound like someone who has yet come to terms with the reality of their downfall. Perhaps Sturgeon’s greatest failing as a politician was an apparent inability to see the other side of the argument – that the opposing side might have reasonable points to make. This played out most damagingly in the debate over gender law reform, where she was openly and provocatively critical of the women who campaigned against her changes. On this most sensitive of issues she was a divider, not a uniter. There is something in her psychology that simply seems unable to tolerate dissent.
Perhaps the central fact about Nicola Sturgeon is that as a politician she was a street fighter along the kill-or-be-killed model, but as a human she is an introverted, sensitive woman who is happiest when curled up with a novel. A bruiser who is also easily bruised. It’s the kind of contrast that could make for a really good book, or a really bad one.
[See also: Kemi Badenoch still has no ideas]