John Swinney was always Nicola Sturgeon’s fixer. The loyal deputy who took on tough roles in education and Covid recovery so that, as leader, she could excel.
So why is Sturgeon now turning on her fiercest backer – and the SNP – the party she claims to love?
In the new 6,000-word paperback preface to her memoir, Frankly, Sturgeon recasts her friend as a man who has failed to live up to her legacy.
She condemns his Holyrood election leadership as lacklustre, declaring the SNP’s pitch lacked “vision or big-picture thinking”. And she claimed the campaign was “detached from the bigger issues bearing down on people’s lives”, according to extracts published by the Scottish Sun.
The last few years for Sturgeon have been tumultuous. Her legacy has been questioned in the fallout of her estranged husband Peter Murrell’s sentencing for embezzling more than £400,000 from the SNP.
But behind her every step of the way has been her loyal SNP colleagues. Swinney has publicly backed Sturgeon and defended her legacy when it would have been easy to pass blame to his predecessors.
After she was arrested in connection with Operation Branchform – the SNP finances probe – SNP MSPs sent flowers to their former leader as a “mark of sympathy”.
But Sturgeon has decided she will never return to elected politics and said she will not be a “backseat driver” in the SNP’s political future. With that comes a new life in London, apparently without much glance back at her SNP colleagues in Holyrood.
Get Scotland's top politics newsletter straight to your inbox.
She doesn’t have to want to be part of elected politics, and she doesn’t have to offer them advice. What she does not need to do is add to the pile‑on.
Yet she doesn’t stop there. She lands further blows to the man who had unquestioned loyalty to her. With a blistering verdict on his leadership that his critics – those outside and inside his own party – will capitalise on.
The direction Swinney was taking the party in was bleeding support to the Scottish Greens, she said, arguing he was “lucky” they did not field more candidates in constituency seats.
Sturgeon is burning bridges with those who have backed her to the hilt while failing to take accountability for the problems she caused the SNP.
Her warnings over net zero are revealing. She said it would be a “massive electoral blunder… for the SNP to soften its left-of-centre environmentalist credentials”.
Read more Unspun:
- Scotland 48p tax rate cost £22m, new analysis finds
- What has the BBC Scotland channel ever done for us?
- Andy Burnham's Scotland visit hands John Swinney an own goal
By castigating Swinney’s pivot towards oil and gas after the North East backlash, she cast herself as the keeper of the SNP’s true values while framing the current leadership as short-term opportunists who have diluted her cause.
Sturgeon’s criticism doesn’t rest with her former deputy though. She digs deeper, warning Swinney’s potential successor may not prevail.
It’s not the first time she has taken a pop at the current crop of SNP MSPs. In December last year, she said that when she looked around the Scottish Parliament she could not “say with any certainty that there will be another female leader anytime soon”.
The irony here is that many of those frontrunners – Mairi McAllan, Jenny Gilruth and Stephen Flynn – are creatures of the Sturgeon era.
Those politicians rose up under her leadership and defended her during scrutiny of gender reform rows, finances and stalling independence strategies. Now she appears to doubt whether any of them can measure up.
Are we to take from this that Sturgeon herself believes she was the SNP’s last hope?
It is already almost impossible for successive SNP leaders to escape Sturgeon’s shadow and the dark cloud of Branchform. But Sturgeon makes sure her criticism will be lasting.
In throwing Swinney, and his successor, under the bus, Sturgeon has not simply distanced herself from those who backed her, she has made the task of rescuing her party immeasurably harder for whoever comes next.
Share