Frankly is Nicola Sturgeon’s bid to “reveal the person behind the politician”. As she puts it, “The seemingly confident, combative woman who dominated Scottish politics for more than a decade, unnerved the Westminster establishment, helped lead Scotland to the verge of independence and steered it through a global pandemic, is … painfully shy, an introvert.”
Well, she doesn’t seem like a martyr to self-doubt in her views and pronouncements. If politics is divided between Roundheads and Cavaliers, she’s a diminutive Roundhead, her inner Presbyterian evident in dogmatic progressivism.
What really sets her apart is that she is a brilliant communicator: clear, coherent and terse.
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Interestingly for one who takes a woman-first approach to every question (except for the trans issue, on which she is palpably confused), this memoir is dominated by a man, the man being Alex Salmond, who died last year. He was Sturgeon’s mentor and political partner, though she was baffled by his social conservatism.
They were briefly the most interesting double act in British politics. Their relationship soured after he resigned as SNP leader, but it was when he was accused of predatory sexual behaviour that she turned against him.
Sturgeon dismisses Salmond’s view that there was a conspiracy against him, yet the Scottish government’s investigation was justifiably condemned as “tainted by apparent bias”. She blames Salmond for fighting back, and her attack on a large man who is now dead diminishes her, but she acknowledges she will never quite escape him.
Where Salmond was right was to tell her that, as leader, she should have sacked her husband, Peter Murrell, as chief executive of the SNP, which she refused to do, even though the dominance of the party by one couple looked awful. The marriage did not survive his arrest for alleged embezzlement. As for the future for the country, she predicts that in 20 years’ time there will be an independent Scotland and a united Ireland in a British isles confederation, with home rule for England and Wales. Is she taking bets on that?
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Sturgeon now declares she has never considered her sexuality to be “binary”. Just think: if she’d made that pronouncement a few years back, there would have been a time when the Scottish Labour Party, the Scottish Tories and the SNP would each have been led by a lesbian or bisexual, which would have been something of a record. She’s thinking of moving to London to escape the goldfish bowl of Scotland where everyone knows her and writes that she now knows what, and who, makes her happy. Politics didn’t, which is perhaps this book’s most useful lesson.
Melanie McDonagh is a columnist at The London Standard
Frankly by Nicola Sturgeon is out 14 August (Pan Macmillan, £28)
