It’s impossible to read Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir without remembering the smash hit fictional franchise, Twilight by Stephenie Meyer.
The heroine of Twilight, a shy, awkward, bookish girl, moves to a small, rainswept town called Forks to live with her single father.
The heroine of Frankly is also a shy, awkward, bookish girl who lives in a small, rainswept town… Both shy, insecure teenagers have dates with destiny. Nicola Sturgeon will one day become First Minister of Scotland. Bella Swan will join the ranks of the undead.
Like all well-rounded characters, Bella Swan has flaws. She’s clumsy and accident-prone, traits that only make her more dorkily loveable.
Sturgeon talks quite a lot about becoming a well-rounded person in Frankly, usually in the context of regretting that she wasn’t one in her hyper-ambitious youth. She admits that she, too, has flaws: lack of confidence, fear of failure, and a heart that simply cares too much. The epigraph of her memoir is a quotation from Eleanor Roosevelt: ‘Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.’ Sturgeon’s alleged imposter syndrome and constant crises of confidence don’t prevent her admitting to ‘the raw talent I had for politics’, or that ‘I certainly wasn’t lacking in ability’, that ‘far from being the weak link, I was seemingly the star attraction’.
Nicola Sturgeon, perception and reality
This bombast is likely to shock some of my liberal London friends who’ve frequently told me, especially during the pandemic, how lucky I was to have such an an earnest, down-to-earth leader in charge. They, of course, were subject to the whims of the then prime minister Boris Johnson, who could have been replaced with three ferrets in a sack and the only change would have been a slight increase in decisiveness and gravitas, so, to them, Sturgeon seemed a paragon of sober governance.
Her English fans can’t be expected to know about every single clusterfuck over which the supposedly competent Sturgeon presided, and they certainly won’t find out about them from Frankly. The mysteriously vanished government WhatsApp messages from the pandemic, the tanking educational outcomes, the CalMac Ferry disaster, the disappearance of a half a million pounds of her own supporters’ money that was supposedly ringfenced for a new independence referendum: you’ll search in vain for candid accounts of these in Frankly; indeed, most aren’t mentioned at all. Perhaps the most disgraceful omission – and I’ll admit to a personal interest here, because I’m married to a doctor who used to run a methadone clinic, so saw the national scandal up close – is the fact that Scotland continues to lead the whole of Europe in drug deaths.
On the Scottish independence referendum, 2014
I doubt many No voters are going to be won over by Frankly. This is partly because Sturgeon doesn’t make a single argument for Scottish independence we haven’t heard a thousand times, but mostly because of the quite extraordinary obtuseness she displays in talking about the referendum of 2014.
“Much has been written since the referendum about how unpleasant and divisive it was. My experience… was the opposite of that characterisation”
No shit, Nicola. You, surrounded only by adoring nationalists, flying between public meetings in a helicopter bearing a large image of your own face, enjoying police protection and all the excitement of potentially bringing about your life’s ambition, enjoyed the referendum? I’m amazed.
Both Sturgeon and her predecessor, Alex Salmond, made great play back in 2014 about how very different their nationalism was to the nasty kind…Oddly, this message didn’t resonate too well with No voters who were being threatened with violence, told to fuck off out of Scotland, quizzed on the amount of Scottish blood that ran in their veins, accused of treachery and treason and informed that they were on the wrong side of, as one ‘cybernat’ memorably put it, ‘a straightforward battle between good and evil.’
Sturgeon and the trans issue
Notwithstanding all the ruminating on sexism and misogyny Sturgeon does in Frankly, always as it affects her personally, she is unshakeable in her belief that if men put on dresses and call themselves women they can only be doing so with innocent motives. Sturgeon hasn’t been remotely humbled by the Supreme Court ruling that proved her government was forcing a misinterpretation of the UK-wide Equality Act on Scotland, one that robbed women of many single sex spaces and of their very existence as a definable class with rights protected in law.
She remains stubbornly wedded to her belief that it is possible to let some men into women’s spaces on the men’s say so, without letting any man who fancies it come inside. She denies there are any risks to a policy of gender self-identification. She can’t imagine any male predator capitalising on such policies, in spite of the fact that it has, demonstrably, happened many times. She is flat out Trumpian in her shameless denial of reality and hard facts.
JK Rowling’s T-shirt
She asks in Frankly what the intentions were, in posting a picture online wearing a T-shirt bearing the words: Nicola Sturgeon, Destroyer of Women’s Rights. She says this was a turning point that changed everything and made her afraid for her physical safety.
Sturgeon, like Bella Swan, has a complete void where a sense of humour should be
Eleven years ago, when she and I found ourselves on opposite sides of a different public debate, I didn’t hold her accountable for all the threats I received from nationalists, nor for the porn her supporters circulated, with my face pasted onto a naked actress’s body. … What were my intentions in posting the picture? I hoped journalists would use it as a pretext to confront the First Minister with questions she’d so far either refused to answer, or treated with contempt, when non-famous women asked them.
The Isla Bryson question
But then Isla Bryson burst into the news. Bryson, a convicted double rapist, had decided he was a woman and would rather be incarcerated with the sex against which he’d already committed the most male of crimes. When asked on television whether bald, blonde wig-wearing Bryson was a man or a woman, the First Minister, whose composure and articulacy under fire had, for years, been her most potent political asset, made herself look – and forgive me for employing a PR term here – a complete fuckwit. She explains in Frankly that she was worried about the impact it would have on trans people if she denied Bryson was a woman.
Does Sturgeon show any humility about this in Frankly? Come now – you know our heroine better than that.
Is Frankly a good read?
And so to the three hundred thousand pound question: is Frankly a good read? Honestly, only if you find Nicola Sturgeon so fascinating the dull details of her political decision-making intrigue you, and are prepared to accept all her special pleading. The biggest impediment to enjoyment is that Sturgeon, like Bella Swan, has a complete void where a sense of humour should be.
Of course, I might be missing the point. Maybe Frankly isn’t supposed to entertain, but to serve as what is sometimes called a CV distinguisher? Its author has expressed a fervent wish to escape the confines of Scotland, and is still young enough that a cushy sinecure with UN Women would be welcome.
JK Rowling’s full review can be ofund on her website jkrowling.com
