NICOLA Sturgeon’s autobiography has hit the shelves – apparently sooner than intended.
Across more than 400 pages, Frankly takes the reader through the highs and lows of her political career and personal life.
Among Sturgeon’s reflections on her journey up the ranks and the high political dramas which defined her time in power, some titbits jumped out during our initial glance over the book.
Here are seven things we learned from our first look at Nicola Sturgeon’s Frankly.
A voter called her a ‘Fenian b*stard’
Sturgeon wasn’t a successful parliamentary candidate until her election to the Scottish Parliament in 1999 – but she cut her teeth standing for Westminster seats before devolution.
The first time she “had even a remote prospect of winning” was in the 1997 election campaigning for Glasgow Govan against Mohammad Sarwar (below).
Glasgow Southside would later become her constituency, but Sturgeon expressed shock at encountering rabid sectarianism in the area at the time.
“I was chased away from one door with shouts of ‘Fenian b*stard’ ringing in my ears, but more sinister were the whispers percolating around the constituency, which I knew were being stoked by elements in the local Labour Party, that I was an active supporter of the IRA.”
‘Sneering’ Jeremy Corbyn
Sturgeon is relatively forgiving about former Tory prime minister David Cameron, saying they enjoyed a “constructive” relationship though they deeply disagreed on much.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn gets a less warm review.
“I never warmed to Corbyn," she writes. "I met him a few times during his leadership of the Labour Party and he exuded the same aura of aloofness and sneering superiority that I have detected in many men on the far left of over the years, particularly around women.”
Carol Vorderman’s detox diet
Casting her mind back to 2003, Sturgeon describes a happy period in her life which saw her take trips to Canada and Croatia as she enjoyed the life of a single young woman living in Glasgow.
But the revelation that she signed up to a fad diet might surprise some.
“I even went on a health kick, becoming a committed disciple of the Carol Vorderman detox diet.
"Whatever people say about fad diets, it worked out and I lost a lot of weight.”
The Telegraph’s ‘atrociously bad journalism’
Sturgeon is not the biggest fan of the print media, that much has been made clear. But Frankly reserves special ire for The Telegraph after the paper reported that Sturgeon would prefer a Tory government over a Labour one.
“Before publishing such a potentially damaging and, as it turned out, wholly inaccurate story about me, The Telegraph should have offered a right of reply.
"It didn’t, no doubt because they feared that my flat denial would have destroyed the story. It was atrociously bad journalism.”
Isla Bryson case wasn’t flagged
Sturgeon’s legacy will be defined for many by her stance in the trans debate.
In Frankly, Sturgeon admits she was “like a rabbit caught in the headlights” when asked about the case of Isla Bryson, a rapist who was initially put in a women's prison. Sturgeon said this was down to a lack of forewarning from advisers and the prison service.
“I had no advance warning the case was pending.
"To this day, I don’t understand how it could be that no one in the Scottish Prison Service or Scottish Government officialdom thought it important to flag it up to me.”
Her ‘soft spot’ for the Daily Record
Like many working-class west of Scotland families, the Sturgeons were a Daily Record family.
“The Daily Record’s role in helping me learn to read and the fact that in later years my Uncle Iain […] would become its assistant editor, meant that, even when it openly backed Labour or encouraged Scotland to vote No in 2014, I still had a soft spot for it.”
‘Sordid SNP love triangle’
The morning that Sturgeon was to be reinstalled as first minister in 2016, news broke that then-MPs Stewart Hosie (below) and Angus MacNeil had both had affairs with the journalist Serena Cowdy.
She was apoplectic with Hosie, then the deputy leader of the SNP: “I didn’t trust myself not to lose my temper with him.”
MacNeil – a “colourful character”, as Sturgeon describes him – gets off a little lighter: “In some ways, Angus’s involvement was no surprise.”
