Every national leader must find their own way to manage the strains of the job. Alex Salmond liked to hang out late at night with friends and a bottle of whisky. Nicola Sturgeon, as her new memoir reveals, would return home after particularly stressful days and have a glass of wine and a little weep (also my preferred coping strategy).
John Swinney rarely drinks, and instead heads out for a run most mornings at 6am. When I interviewed him for my think tank Enlighten this week, he told me that this gives him some time to himself each day before the intensity of the role closes around him. He does much of his thinking as he jogs.
The First Minister suddenly has a lot of thinking to do. Sturgeon’s book, Frankly, (which I’ve reviewed in these pages) has gone off like a grenade in what might otherwise have been a quietish summer for Swinney. When I put some of its more incendiary revelations to him, he was clearly uncomfortable. It offered a “fascinating insight into Scottish political history”, he said, which is one way of putting it.
I asked about whether he agreed with Sturgeon’s portrayal of Salmond as, at times, a bully, a bit of a drunk, a man who was too often detached from the details. But Swinney is far too seasoned to land himself in the middle of the long war between his predecessors. “For me, in my role today, and what I have got to do for Scotland just now, I have got to focus on the country and the future. That is what I am best to concentrate my thinking on,” he told me. Not a very satisfying response, but it was the only one I was getting. Interviewing Swinney, it has to be said, is a bit like bowling to Geoffrey Boycott.
The FM did, however, have words of praise for Sturgeon, whose memoir has taken something of a pasting, especially from the gender-critical movement and from allies of Salmond. He praised her leadership during the Covid pandemic. “We were all taking big decisions in difficult circumstances,” he said. “In a moment of absolutely unparalleled difficulty for the country, in which there was no manual, there was no precedent, I saw Nicola Sturgeon deliver considered and careful leadership as we moved our way through the pandemic, under enormous strain of delivering against those expectations, those difficulties.”
“Leadership is not easy,” he added. “It is not straightforward. The decisions I take are invariably contested decisions. Ultimately, it is your call, you have got to decide.” Making those choices was a “very lonely place”.
Such are the demands of the gig. The easy decisions are made further down the food chain, and you are left with the marginal calls. This is one reason Swinney only ever wears purple ties, he told me – it is one less choice to make each day.
Swinney is a calm and measured presence. But however much oil he tries to pour on troubled waters, it seems unlikely to work. Salmond’s widow, Moira, is continuing her late husband’s legal challenge against the Scottish government, which accuses ministers and civil servants of “malfeasance” in their handling of the sexual misconduct allegations that were made against him. It asks for £3m in compensation. Salmond may be gone, but he still casts a long shadow over the SNP.
Sturgeon’s portrayal of Salmond in her book has enraged his family and supporters, and reignited the whole affair. It will now run through the months leading up to next May’s Holyrood election, which is likely to be the most closely contested and controversial for many years. Polls show the SNP in the lead, and on course for a third consecutive decade in office, but voters will regularly be reminded of the deep schisms that now exist in the nationalist movement. There is still the prospect of a court case involving Sturgeon’s husband, the former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, who has been charged with embezzlement of party funds. The dispute over gender reform burns endlessly on. And then there is the matter of independence itself.
This, too, is a legacy of Sturgeon’s time in power. As she pushed and pushed for a second referendum, she devised ever more tortured routes to achieving one. First, Brexit made another referendum essential. Then, she argued that there was a majority of pro-independence MSPs in government, after the Nats entered into coalition with the Greens. Then last year’s general election would be a “de facto” referendum, and if the SNP secured a majority of Scottish seats (or votes – the metric was never entirely clear) the UK government would surely have to allow a fresh vote on secession.
None of these options amounted to anything like a convincing plan, or captured the public imagination, and each fell by the wayside. The confusion damaged Sturgeon’s reputation for competence and helped bring about her resignation.
Swinney has now set out his own strategy, which is to return to the conditions that brought about the 2014 vote: a majority of SNP seats at Holyrood. Salmond achieving this in the 2011 election led David Cameron to grant a plebiscite.
However, despite its lead in the polls, there is nothing to suggest the Nats have a chance of repeating that feat, which is made all the harder by a voting system specifically designed to prevent overall majorities and instead encourage cross-party collaboration. Swinney’s ambition is therefore what mandarins would describe as bold. With the public weary of the independence debate dominating every aspect of Scottish politics, it looks to me like he is biffing the issue into the long grass.
I put this to him. “I’ve believed in independence all my adult life. It’s an urgent necessity. The idea of punting it into the long grass is just laughable for me,” he said. “But I’ve got to be realistic. An independent Scotland can only come about if it carries domestic and international legitimacy. That was the case in 2014. If we want to advance on this issue there has got to be a means of breaking the logjam that we’re currently in. I’m simply saying to people – 2011, when the SNP won a majority of seats in the Scottish Parliament, that led to a referendum in 2014. And that precedent – that’s the word I hinge this on – is one that if we want independence to happen, we’ve got to rely on.”
“You say that’s a bold ambition, but we’ve got to look at where thinking is about independence in Scotland.”
These are reasonable points, but they are unlikely to persuade the Indy hardcore, who will always demand one more push. The unity with which the Nats have tended to go into elections in recent decades is a thing of the past. The independence movement is simmering with anger and frustration, and the broad mass of the electorate has, for now at least, moved on to other matters.
Independence may be an urgent necessity for the First Minister, but in truth it has rarely felt further away. Or to put it in words a runner might understand, it is once again a marathon rather than a sprint.
[See also: Scotland and the cry for change]
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