NICOLA Sturgeon has hit out at “hurtful” comments about her not having children, saying people who assume she has chosen to put her career first “know nothing of the reality”.
Hinting at private sorrow, she says: “Sometimes things happen in life. Sometimes they don’t.”
The First Minister’s candid remarks are made in today’s edition of Desert Island Discs.
Broadcaster Kirsty Young asks about “implicit criticism” from opponents about the SNP leader and her husband of five years, party chief executive Peter Murrell, not having children.
Sturgeon, 45, says: “That can be hurtful, if I’m being brutally honest about it, because people make assumptions about why we don’t have children, and frankly people who make those assumptions know nothing of the reality of that.
“The assumptions people sometimes make is that I have made a cold, calculated decision to put my career ahead of having a family, and that’s not true. It never has been true. Sometimes things happen in life. Sometimes they don’t.
“Don’t get me wrong, I have no regrets in life. If I could turn the clock back ten, twenty years, I wouldn’t want to fundamentally change the path that my life has taken.
“But it’s the way in which people assume that it’s all part of this kind of cold, calculating, career-driven woman, and actually I think for most women that couldn’t be further from the truth.”
The interview, which ranges from teenage nights at Frosty’s Ice Disco in Irvine to the shortcomings of Police Scotland, kicks off a week of events around the anniversary of Sturgeon becoming First Minister on November 19.
Despite being Alex Salmond’s deputy for a decade, Sturgeon says the most eye-opening part of the past 12 months had been the truth of the old cliché that it’s lonely at the top.
“Nothing quite prepares you for that moment when you’ve got to take the first big decision,” she says, revealing she is currently gleaning tips from the ultimate Tory - Mrs Thatcher.
Admitting she will be “slated for it”, Sturgeon says: “I’m reading the Charles Moore biography of Mrs Thatcher at the moment. I’m interested in the art and science of decision-making.”
She says she and Murrell try to escape from politics at the weekend, when “all we really want to do is sit in front of the television with a glass of wine and fall asleep”.
However her famously unflappable husband, seen as the backroom driver of the SNP’s electoral success, is also there when the political pressures build up.
“I’m quite hotheaded. I’m quite impulsive. It doesn’t last very long thankfully, but if I’m confronted with a big problem I go, ‘’Oh my goodness, what am I going to do about it?’
“Whereas he’s very calm and doesn’t get flustered and that is exactly what I need in my life, particularly just now.”
Citing her SNP-supporting English grandmother as an influence on her politics, Sturgeon says was “genuinely upset” when people saw the Yes campaign as “a rejection of England as a country or England as a people” during the independence referendum.
She says the No vote left her “totally and utterly devastated” and in “floods of tears”, however defeating Scottish Labour in May’s general election was “a huge moment of euphoria”.
She credits her parents with instilling a sense of self-belief in her that was “nothing short of remarkable”, explaining it as: “You can do what you want. Don’t let people tell you that because of your gender or background or family you’re not able to go on to achieve what your heart wants you to achieve. And I never doubted that.”
Among her eight records, she chose Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves by the Eurythmics and Aretha Franklin, saying: “Gender issues matter a lot to me. I’m the first woman to hold the job as First Minister, so this is a song that speaks to the feminist in me.”
However her favourite song is Robert Burns’s My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose, sung by Eddi Reader, which was played just before she and Murrell took their marriage vows.
From among many “classic Duran Duran tracks”, she choses Ordinary World.
“I am, notwithstanding all the political chat, just an Eighties girl at heart,” she says.
Her book choice was the Complete Works of Jane of Austen and her luxury item a coffee machine: “The one thing I can’t do without in the morning is my injection of caffeine”.
Being without Twitter on a desert island would be “bliss”, but she admits a lack of practical skills means she wouldn’t “survive a week” away from civilisation.
Desert Islands Discs, BBC Radio 4, 1115 today.
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