Had I eagerly shelled out £28 in advance for a copy of Nicola Sturgeon’s memoirs, I’d now be inclined to cut up rough.
Frankly’s juiciest bits have been sprayed with abandon everywhere this week – interviews graciously granted; studios regally toured – to the point that today, on official publication, must feel like hurtling joyously downstairs of that cold and frosty morning to find someone has opened all your Christmas presents.
And such chunks; and such gobbets. As if the sometime First Minister had rolled onto The Jeremy Kyle Show and told all.
Like those magazines of the TV ChitChat order you glimpse in passing at the shops. Shrieking headlines like ‘My Dad left my Mum – for my boyfriend!!!’
Before even the silky dustjacket is in your hands, even before said autobiography falls open with that exquisite whiff of printers’ inks, you already know Sturgeon thinks she may be non-binary.
Who does not rule out, some day, a relationship with another woman. That, as a quivering Scottish Parliament newbie, some rank man kept sidling up to her to snigger about a coarse – and, indeed, apocryphal – nickname.
Yet Sturgeon, heedless of the no-smoke-without-fire brigade, throws it out there again, amidst much other titillation.
She has, no doubt, decades ahead of her to look back and wonder why none of her Pan Macmillan editors – eagerly egging her on – raised a hand gently to breathe, ‘Whoa…’
Nicola Sturgeon recounted conversations with the late Queen in her memoirs
And thus Nicola Sturgeon is left sprawled out there on the reputational beach. Not in the thoughtful, statesmanlike company of, say, Thatcher or Mitterand, Garret Fitzgerald or Charles de Gaulle.
Much more in the tawdry, brackish he-bwoke-my-necklace waters of Harry and Meghan. And even the late Queen, come to think of it, is betrayed by Sturgeon.
There is an unwritten rule that conversations with the Sovereign are not repeated. Especially her exchanges with ministers.
All in Elizabeth II’s circle knew that she only welcomed tittle-tattle from her closest personal servants – pages, her dresser and that; those she saw every day.
Yet Ms Sturgeon quotes the Queen at some length, declares – improbably – that Her Majesty ‘loved a bit of a gossip’ and wanted details of the racked Alex Salmond.
Some, too, have wondered aloud why, given the fraught state of Scottish publishing, Sturgeon rolled all the way down to London town to spill such beans.
Surely money was not a consideration for our sometime National Mammy? And there are oddities.
Sturgeon, it seems, cares far more about the rights of trans-identifying men in her deathless prose – she devotes pages and pages to it – than about the cause to which she has supposedly devoted her life.
Ms Sturgeon appears to care far more about the rights of trans-identifying men than Scottish independence in her memoirs
Scotland’s independence, meriting nothing like as many paragraphs and barely a tenth of the passion.
The pages of Frankly, too, are strewn with factual errors: silly mistakes, easily checked. One instance will suffice.
Recalling when Covid-19 rolled in like a tsunami, Sturgeon hyperventilates, ‘We moved more quickly than the other governments to ban mass gatherings and close schools.’
Actually, Sturgeon’s general approach was slyly to ascertain what ministers in Whitehall were about to do – and then announce it first.
And Scotland’s schools closed their doors on Friday 20 March 2020 – the same day as every other school across the United Kingdom.
Almost the saddest aspect of Sturgeon’s autobiography is her obsession with Alex Salmond – longtime friend, a colleague through decades, a mentor at critical moments.
Until they fell so spectacularly out, from 2017, like jostling barons at a Shakespearean court.
Bloated and bitter, Salmond died last October at some conference in the Balkans.
That recent demise – and broken hearts left behind – might, you think, have signalled some Sturgeon caution.
On top of three incontestable facts: Salmond in 2019 won a civil court case, with costs and damages, against the Scottish Government. M’luds concluded that it had treated Salmond ‘unlawfully,’ in a manner ‘tainted with apparent bias.’
A year later he was acquitted of all charges – by a majority in each instance – of criminal offences against womn, this by a majority-women jury under a presiding female judge, Lady Dorian.
And, a year after that, the relevant Holyrood committee concluded that Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister, had in the course of this tacky episode misled the Scottish Parliament.
Indeed, giving evidence to that committee, there were extraordinary lapses in the Sturgeon memory: one can but congratulate her, half a decade on, how much her grasp of events has improved.
In Frankly, she now goes after her late patron like a studs-up Emily Maitlis. As early as 1989, Sturgeon confides of some internal party episode, she had ‘doubts.’
During the independence referendum, she now and then questioned Salmond’s judgement – though privately, of course; always ‘privately.’
Which did not prevent Sturgeon’s 2004 plot with him to trick Roseanna Cunningham out of the SNP’s deputy leadership, joyously leading the Nationalist charge at Holyrood (Salmond then was marooned in the Commons), holding high office under him for seven years and great prominence in that independence campaign.
Salmond was buried on October 29 yet she is yet fixated on him, even after his two-nil triumph in the courts, her own censure by her Holyrood peers and when, as a woman far more important once murmured, some recollections may vary.
Like Holmes and Moriarty, and as far as Nicola Sturgeon is concerned, she and Salmond must be roped together for always, tumbling down the Reichenbach Falls of history.
The sometime First Minister gives little thought to the other women, Roseanna Cunningham apart, slighted or brutalised as Sturgeon surged through the decades to become great.
She has always howled down the obvious comparisons with Margaret Thatcher, apt as they are. As to what her surrogates did to, for instance, Johanna Cherry and J K Rowling – well, silence is golden.
Or, perhaps, just yellow. And then, working the phones in 2023, briefing her useful idiots in the Scottish media, watching complacently as the Scottish Greens joined the pile-on against Kate Forbes.
Twisting her faith and background – a Free Church launched, you know, in a radical stand against despotic landlordism – till leadership-candidate Forbes was suitably painted as the sort of crazy Pentecostal from the Appalachians who dances with snakes.
But saddest of all is how self-demeaningly, Nicola Sturgeon does down herself.
This was our most cultured and best-read First Minister since Donald Dewar. A girl without advantage or contacts from an Ayrshire new town who spurned the most obvious (and the laziest) vehicle for ambition – the Labour Party – and who refused to sit at the back of the bus and shut up.
By hard, hard work and against daunting odds – it took her four draining bids to win Glasgow Govan – Sturgeon clawed her way to power. Was not ashamed to reinvent her image. Impressed civil servants in every brief she held.
A fearsome debater; a tough political operator. Swept to the SNP leadership, at the last, unopposed. A woman with a delicious sense of humour, at her peak beset everywhere for selfies.
Who sold out the SECC Hydro faster than Beyoncé and would win eight national elections on the trot. Yet all, inexplicably, that drips through the pages of Frankly is the whine of a victim.
