Nicola Sturgeon has revealed she felt “most uncomfortable” during the 2016 Scottish Parliament election when the SNP’s publicity campaign focused almost entirely on her.
The front cover of the party’s manifesto featured only her face alongside the single word “Re-elect”.
The slogan “Nicola Sturgeon for First Minister” became the campaign’s strapline and appeared on billboards across Scotland, often with large photographs of her.
Within days, the party also had merchandise emblazoned with “#ImWithNicola.”
Even though she believes the strategy ultimately did the SNP “no harm”, Ms Sturgeon writes that it was “overdone” and born from “a strange mix of insecurity, electoral expedience and arrogance”.
“No one other than me thought I lacked legitimacy as First Minister,” she writes.
"However, I was obsessed with getting my own mandate. As far as I was concerned, until I had put myself on the line and been elected First Minister in my own right, I wouldn’t be taken seriously."
Her approval ratings were high, routinely exceeding the SNP’s, and she was, she says, viewed as a “massive electoral asset”.
But the approach, she admits, “ended up a bit over the top” and was driven by her own ego.
“I had started to believe, politically speaking, that I really did walk on water. Indeed, if there was any period in my time as leader when I succumbed to hubris, this was it.”
It was the “#ImWithNicola” merchandise, she says, that made her feel most uneasy, suggesting it implied “voters were expected to pledge loyalty to me rather than the other way round — and I hated it”.
Although she did not personally micromanage the campaign leaflets and marketing, she now wishes she had stopped the more overtly personal branding.
Despite her discomfort, the SNP won a decisive victory. Sturgeon secured 61.4% of the vote in her Glasgow Southside constituency, with her majority surging to 9,593. Nationally, the party increased its share of the constituency vote, becoming the first in the history of the re-established Scottish Parliament to secure more than one million votes.
But the result still fell short of an outright majority, prompting some commentators to portray it as a disappointment. “It was frustrating,” Sturgeon writes, “but that, I suppose, is politics.”
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