If Nicola Sturgeon’s vivid and technicolour interventions since demitting office are anything to go by then her memoirs will be dramatic indeed. I’d suggest that booksellers might even consider listing them in their fantasy sections.
The latest splurge of revisionism from the former first minister includes a bizarre claim that the ending of the Bute House Agreement between the SNP and the Scottish Greens was “catastrophic”.
In one of many interviews she’s conducted after moving to her new, informal part-time status as an MSP, Ms Sturgeon said: “I think crashing that agreement was catastrophic and – politics aside – totally the wrong thing to do for stable government.”
She also said that the agreement would be “more stable, lead to less horse-trading and be a better use of public money”. The reality, of course, was that the two shameless charlatans who lead the Scottish Greens – Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater – have landed the Scottish Government with a £160 million lawsuit from Biffa, the waste management company, over the doomed deposit return scheme (DRS), a project much more deserving of the description “catastrophic”.
Ms Sturgeon, when she’s not pursuing her creepy obsession with trashing the memory of Alex Salmond (safe in the knowledge that he can’t respond), has also tried to compare herself favourably with him. Oh yes, and some of those who watched big, bustling Crawford Baptie of Falkirk in his 1980s heyday reminded them of Marco van Basten.
Ms Sturgeon, continuing to show not a shred of common humanity to Mr Salmond’s grieving widow, accused her deceased predecessor of being a bully. This from the woman who accused some of her female colleagues as being bigots merely for opposing the gender self-ID fetish.
And who couldn’t bring herself to support Joanna Cherry when she was subject to multiple threats of sexual violence that resulted in conviction.
Even more fantastical and bizarre are her claims that she couldn’t have done any more to achieve Scottish independence. Others would say that she couldn’t have done much less.
Joanna Cherry, one of the paltry few SNP politicians in the last few years who can walk and talk at the same time, said: “How does she know? She refused to discuss it.”
New chapter in life
If Ms Sturgeon’s memoirs are indeed characterised by such sophistry and make-believe then we’re all surely in for a literary treat.
Some of the chapter headings will include: How I became a bookworm when I was a foetus and caught a wee bit of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago on A Book At Bedtime on Radio 4.
Aliens exist and they cut about in campervans. My lived experience of a Close Encounter Of The Third Kind in a Dunfermline driveway.
How I was visited by a white unicorn in a dream who told me that if I made a wish beside Maid Morville’s Mound near the River Annick in Dreghorn, she would miraculously cut the educational attainment gap.
How I felt a deep sense of betrayal by discovering that Kate Forbes really was a member of the Free Church of Scotland. And how she intimidated me by always smiling at me in a passive-aggressive way and muttering the Lord’s Prayer under her breath.
Revealed: my furious row with Cabinet colleagues over my plans to make Val McDermid Minister for Covid. And how I vowed to carry on after me and Frank the doorman got howling with the drink one night in Bute House and it made me get things in perspective.
For Peter’s sake
MS Sturgeon is, I think, unfairly maligned for being overly circumspect and abrupt in her personal dealings with friends and political colleagues. Yet those who know her best insist that, beneath her chilly exterior, rages a torrent of passion. Surely then, she will lift the lid on the life-changing romance that led her to the altar with her husband, Peter, and how it ended in sorrow.
How he wooed her by sending her picture messages of train timetables in esoteric locations such as Dunbar and Lesmahagow. How, on their first dinner date, he had recited all the new flight destinations from Edinburgh Airport and how she had responded with a smoky “You had me at Baku”.
How he’d then listed all the potential advantages of the fabled third runway at Heathrow. How could it not set a girl’s head spinning?
How their love blossomed as he outlined his vision of a political party fit for the 21st century by raising funds with branded SNP trinkets and knick-knacks. And how he’d been intrigued by Joseph Stalin’s old party piece of fitting wires under the chairs of party dissidents to give them an electric shock whenever they spoke out of turn.
And how despite their separation he will always occupy the softest place in her heart, and that they’ll always have The Barras.
Prosperous future
MS Sturgeon has only just recently entered her sixth decade and still has much to offer Scotland and the world beyond. Perhaps her memoirs will provide clues as to her future plans once Operation Branchform concludes around 2031.
Obviously there will be an academic offer from the John Smith Institute of Bread and Circuses at the University of Glasgow. Her old friend and sparring partner Kezia Dugdale held the prestigious Charlotte Street Partners Chair of Applied Political Necromancy and Charms there.
Ms Sturgeon, I feel, could become a visiting professor of children’s fiction and daytime television, and its influence on her Cabinet selections as First Minister.
Perhaps, too, she’ll tell us more about her plans to tour the UK’s cultural festivals with Mhairi Black and their experimental and avant-garde comedy show.
This will represent a challenge to outdated, exclusionary and discredited comedy tropes of telling jokes and making people laugh.
However, I fancy her to secure a tidy wee number in Brussels with the European Development Fund for Delivering Funds for International Development and Mutual European Co-operation and Diversity.
Share