So, what’s new? Ms Sturgeon’s entire nine-year tenure as First Minister was characterised by “a lack of vision or big-picture thinking”.
We should perhaps be grateful for her political insularity, though. Just about everything within her narrow focus turned to dust in a decade of unremitting failure. The attainment gap remains wide; our deprived communities are all still deprived; the challenge of addiction became a crisis; no Promise has been delivered and the movement she led has become a nasty, unpleasant and vengeful organism, whose senior officers (including her) stand accused of turning a blind eye to the weapons-grade corruption that was happening in their executive suite. God knows what mayhem would have ensued if she’d started thinking about “the big picture”.
She wasn’t even any good at independence. Having been bequeathed a healthy, united and well-run party of independence which shook the British establishment to its Union Jack foundation garments, she proceeded to squander it. After promising a referendum in almost every year since 2016, Ms Sturgeon declared in 2017 there would be “a reset” which reimagined it by 2021.
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As Joanna Cherry said in her own much better-written and revelatory memoir, “her reset was the first step in a strategy of kicking the can down the road, until such time as the road ran out”.
At least Mr Swinney now knows what it’s like to be on the thick end of a Nicola Sturgeon hounding. Perhaps he’ll feel released from whatever servile pledge had previously bound him to glorify her name at all times.
The most entertaining snippets in a self-pitying, inchoate ramble through the ribbons of her vivid imagination are rendered more so because they come with no hint of irony. Ms Sturgeon tells us she’s enjoying living outside Scotland. Oh, the rage-bait for her former devotees.
“Until it came up in the context of the police investigation in 2023, I did not even know that the infamous camper-van existed,” she continues to insist. The rest of Scotland, meanwhile, shouts: “It’s behind you”, as though she were Buttons in a Cinderella panto.
Referring to what she understood to be the reaction that greeted the first imprint of her memoir, she writes: “a lot of people told me I had been too hard on myself.” Perhaps this is why she opted for her big London flit. Clearly her new friends on the Home Counties literary circuit know nothing about what really happened in Scotland during Ms Sturgeon’s tenure.
Even within the restricted space of her 6,000-word codicil, there’s a contrived obsession with “right-wing populism”, this being the favoured put-down of the artisan lefties when working-class people point out their hypocrisies.
She aligns herself with the Scottish Greens who, she says, could have taken more seats from the SNP if they’d stood in more constituencies. Which rather overlooks the fact that the Bearsden Bolshevists only did well in seats where the delicatessens sell warm pastrami on rye.
Ms Sturgeon is gushing about the Scottish Greens. “They didn’t want the analysis of right-wing populists about the causes of these challenges to be meekly accepted or appeased. They wanted those arguments to be confronted with passion – but, moreover, with reason and credible solutions.”
Later, she writes: “It was the Scottish Greens who, in my view, came closest to injecting a sense of hope for the future into the campaign. I don’t agree with the Greens on everything – though I do on a lot – but, even on deeply controversial issues, they have the courage to stand up for what they believe in, without equivocation or apology.”
Would that be the same Scottish Greens who embody everything that she purports to lament: bullying, deep-rooted misogyny and homophobia and the hounding of opponents, especially in identity politics? And who harbour an ugly strain of anti-Israel invective?
Several Scottish charities advocating for the homeless, addicts and handicapped people are struggling today. Perhaps, if Ms Sturgeon took a break from sipping cocktails in London salons and her interminably long book tour, she could pop back up now and then and help them get their voices heard.
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It’s just that she weaponised the identity debate to attack decent, committed, liberal women. And some of these organisations are led by the wrong sort of liberals, or “the hard right” as her supporters call them.
She weeps about “the breakdown of any semblance of a rules-based international order” and laments the ascendancy of a ‘might is right’ mind-set. There’s a sense within many countries, she says, “that democracy is in reverse”. This from the former leader of a party which routinely flouts the law and ransacks the public finances to fund worthless legal challenges.
Her government embraced the playbook of the regimes that scare her: the workplace climate of fear for dissenters; the 6am knock; the politicisation of Police Scotland; the wholesale doctrinal capture of the NHS and the education sector; the incessant onslaughts against women who won’t wheesht; the STUC’s mass betrayal of female members who refuse to bend the knee to the new state dogma.
When experienced party activists attempted to ask pertinent questions about the SNP’s finances while her tea-leaf husband was transitioning to fancy-goods tycoon, shameless Ms Sturgeon shut them down and humiliated them so that everyone else would get the message.
“Until recently there was widespread acceptance that there are such things as objective facts, and that they matter,” she now writes. In this party, on her watch, objective facts were non-binary.
Kevin McKenna is Scotland’s Columnist of the Year
