Nicola Sturgeon has been paid the first instalment of a £300,000 advance for her “deeply personal and revealing” memoirs, according to her register of interests in Holyrood.
The former first minister has received £75,000 from the publisher Pan Macmillan, the first of four payments for the book.
The memoir will start with Ms Sturgeon’s childhood in Irvine, Ayrshire, chart her political awakening and her rise to the top of Scottish politics.
It will cover her eight years in office as the first woman to hold the post of first minister taking in her dealings with five prime ministers, her role in the independence referendum in 2014 and its aftermath, and her navigation of the coronavirus pandemic.
Political opponents have suggested that her book should also go into detail about her policy failures as first minister.
Details of the advance were made public in the MSPs’ declaration of interests register, which was updated on the Scottish Parliament website on Friday when media interest was distracted by the result of the Rutherglen & Hamilton West by-election, it was reported by the Sunday Times.
Ms Sturgeon, 53, announced her resignation as party leader and first minister in February, citing the pressures of holding office for so long on her personal and political life.
She stood down in March following the election of Humza Yousaf in the SNP leadership contest.
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A police investigation into the funding and financing of the party during her period as leader is believed to have played a part in the SNP’s trouncing in Rutherglen, where Scottish Labour’s Michael Shanks won with a 20-point swing.
Ms Sturgeon, her husband Peter Murrell, who is also a former SNP chief executive, and the former party treasurer Colin Beattie were all arrested released without charge as part of Operation Branchform.
The memoir deal was announced in August, and Ms Sturgeon said at the time that she was “thrilled” to be working on the project.
“Embarking on this book is exciting, if also daunting,” she said, “I aim to chronicle key events of the past three decades of Scottish and British politics and take the reader behind the scenes to describe how it felt to be in the room, who else was there, the relationships involved and how decisions were arrived at.”
Craig Hoy, chairman of the Scottish Conservatives, said: “SNP MPs and MSPs will be spitting feathers that Nicola Sturgeon is already raking in huge sums for her memoirs while they are left to deal with the chaos, division and scandal she’s left behind.
“If she is to retain a shred of credibility, and her publishers are to get bang for their buck, she needs to be frank about the personal and policy failings that have plunged her party into turmoil."
Sturgeon announced that she was writing her memoir after a series of WhatsApp chats with her friend Val McDermid, the crime author, who had told her to “stop fannying about talking to me and get writing”.
Her agent, Andrew Gordon, said there had been a “hotly contested” nine-way auction for the book and Ms Sturgeon has set up a company, Nicola Sturgeon Ltd, to handle income from earnings outside politics while she continues as the backbench MSP for Glasgow Southside.
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