END OF NICOLA MANIA
Once seen as invincible, Nicola Sturgeon suffered a disastrous 2017. And, as this update to a major biography reveals, the SNP leader is paying the price for her control-freak tendency
Until the summer of 2016, the word most often used to describe nicola Sturgeon was ‘cautious’. She was not, like her predecessor, a political gambler.
this SnP leader preferred to examine a possible course of action from several angles before reaching a decision. Yet on June 24, 2016, the First Minister of Scotland threw caution to the wind.
Quoting from the SnP’s recent Holyrood manifesto, Sturgeon said the Brexit vote clearly constituted a ‘significant and material change’ to the status quo. Although she believed her job was to ‘act responsibly’ it would not, she added, ‘be right to rush to judgment’.
nevertheless, the necessary legislation was to be prepared so that the ‘option’ of a second independence referendum would be ‘on the table’. later, she predicted this course of action to be ‘highly likely’.
in the heady days that followed, it looked to many as if the SnP leader was on top of her game, the only politician in the UK who actually had a plan.
Yet first impressions can be misleading. Within months, it was clear the First Minister had done precisely what she claimed to be avoiding, a ‘rush to judgment’, the consequences of which would culminate in her party experiencing a major setback in the June 2017 general election.
Sturgeon had allowed no time for reflection, no time for soundings, no time to examine public opinion. She had mistaken her gut reaction with that of most Scots, one million of whom had voted to leave, many in SnP heartlands.
For a party that made a point of positioning itself where it believed mainstream Scottish opinion to be, that was dangerous. ‘the SnP makes mistakes,’ a one-time Salmond aide observed, ‘when it assumes Scotland thinks like it does.’
At the Glasgow Science Centre that same Friday morning, the Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson looked shattered. A leading Remain campaigner, she now found herself on the losing side, fearful her strategy for rehabilitating the once-despised Scottish tories was about to be swept aside by nicola Sturgeon’s obvious determination to hold a second independence referendum.
But when Davidson and her adviser Eddie Barnes watched the First Minister’s Bute House statement, their mood lightened.
Her ‘highly likely’ phrase and intimation that referendum legislation would be prepared suddenly handed the Conservatives a strategy, one that would see the party make further electoral gains.
Responding at her party’s modest headquarters in Edinburgh’s new town, Davidson declared another independence referendum ‘not in the best interests of Scotland’.
‘the 1.6million votes cast in this referendum in favour of Remain,’ she added, ‘do not wipe away the two million votes that were cast less than two years ago.’ the situation required ‘a calm, measured response’, a clear dig at the SnP leader.
Ruth Davidson was not alone in believing Sturgeon had gone too far. Strategists close to former SnP leader Alex Salmond privately agreed, although they had not been consulted. ‘We were all as surprised as anyone,’ said one, ‘we didn’t know it was coming. Our view was, don’t do it now.’
Rather, the very self-contained First Minister had reached the decision pretty much on her own, believing her form of words necessary to achieve ‘leverage’ with the UK Government, some sort of differential status for Scotland which had, after all, voted to Remain in the EU by 62 to 38 per cent. this, too, proved a miscalculation.
‘Being prepared and in control is what has powered Sturgeon,’ observed the journalist Mandy Rhodes. ‘Being vulnerable and powerless are not positions [she] likes to be in.’
Rhodes was referring to the news – revealed in a book of essays about SnP leaders – that Sturgeon had suffered a miscarriage in 2011. ‘By allowing my own experience to be reported,’ said the First Minister in a statement, ‘i hope… i might contribute in a small way to a future climate in which these matters are respected as entirely personal.’
intentional or not, thereafter no one asked Sturgeon about children; no one speculated as to why she had not had a family.
Elsewhere in her biographical essay, Mandy Rhodes described Sturgeon as an intensely private person, her closest relationships having ‘diminished to a handful’ since succeeding Alex Salmond in november 2014.
they consisted of her husband [SnP chief executive Peter Murrell], her family and, to an extent, colleagues such as [Health Secretary] Shona Robison. ‘there is no real inner circle.’
Until early 2016, nicola Sturgeon had appeared invincible, especially since leading her party to an unprecedented victory in the 2015 election, winning almost 50 per cent of the vote and all but three Scottish MPs.
She was, according to this newspaper, ‘the most dangerous woman in Britain’, but while her enormous popularity was remarkable, it also proved transient.
A year later there was chatter about the return of Sturgeon’s pre-2004 ‘nippy sweetie’ persona, a demeanour far removed from her incredibly slick public image.
Stories circulated of the First Minister losing her rag in meetings with civil servants, proof, perhaps, the pressure of the job was getting to her, something exacerbated by a tendency to micro-manage aspects of the role Alex Salmond usually delegated.
Adding to this pressure were events. At Scottish parliament elections in May 2016, the SnP lost its overall majority, while the same month Stewart Hosie – Sturgeon’s deputy leader – resigned following disclosures of an affair with a journalist.
Asked for her reaction at Holyrood, the First Minister tried to evade the Press pack and ended up, humiliatingly, answering their questions from inside an elevator.
Control-freak tendencies also
‘Intensely private person... there is no real inner circle’
‘Well-mannered yet rampant lioness’
manifested themselves in other respects.
An attempt by the Scottish Government to place ministerial aides on parliamentary committees ended in an embarrassing U-turn, while a proposed trade deal with China collapsed after ministers tried to keep the details secret.
When these emerged anyway, Nicola Sturgeon lashed out, bizarrely blaming her political opponents.
In the run-up to the US election, meanwhile, she broke with standard protocol and expressed her ‘fervent’ desire that Hillary Clinton would be elected President. When Donald Trump emerged victorious, the First Minister backtracked and despatched a letter of congratulation to the White House.
‘Running countries isn’t like having a social media account,’ observed Merryn Somerset Webb. ‘Self-righteous virtue-signalling is meaningless on Facebook. But it comes back to bite you if you are a First Minister with a real parliament and real responsibilities.’
In certain quarters, however, the First Minister continued to inspire sycophancy. During a visit to Dublin, Irish senators lavished her with praise, while the independence-supporting actor Alan Cumming referred to a ‘well-mannered yet rampant lioness’.
A September 2016 YouGov opinion poll, however, found Ruth Davidson overtake Sturgeon in the popularity stakes; the First Minister was now as divisive a figure as her famously ‘Marmite’ predecessor.
It had long been an article of faith for Nicola Sturgeon that the Labour Party was little more than a pale imitation of the Conservative Party, but with the election of Jeremy Corbyn on September 24, 2016, that ‘Red Tory’ jibe began to look a little threadbare.
Within moments of his election, the SNP leader issued a statement basically setting him up to fail. Miraculously, Labour was now criticised for being too weak rather than too Tory.
Significantly, this meant Sturgeon found herself increasingly squeezed between Left (Corbyn) and Right (Davidson). Her European strategy, meanwhile, was also undergoing revision.
No longer did the First Minister speak of Scotland (independent or otherwise) remaining part of the EU, but rather staying inside the single market.
The SNP was pivoting away from its ‘independence in Europe’ stance, but then it had become clear that while some No voters had moved to the Yes camp because of Brexit, they had been cancelled out by Brexitsupporting Nationalists who had no intention of swapping ‘London control’ for the Brussels variety.
Sturgeon, therefore, began acknowledging that a million Scots had voted Leave and charged her Standing Committee on Europe with figuring out the detail of a compromise.
Shortly before Christmas 2016, the Scottish Government published Scotland’s Place in Europe, which set out a preferred scenario of the whole UK retaining membership of the single market and, failing that, Scotland alone.
It also claimed, rather unconvincingly, Scotland could find a way of remaining in the single market without leaving the UK, a constitutional scenario for which there was no real precedent. Meanwhile Mike Russell, sacked by Sturgeon in 2014, was brought in from the cold to sell this policy to Westminster.
The First Minister also made valiant efforts to decouple the idea of a second independence referendum from Brexit. The case for self-government, she argued, ‘ultimately transcends’ issues such as Brexit and, conveniently, ‘balance sheets’.
Once a believer in what she called ‘utilitarian’ nationalism, the SNP leader was becoming more ‘existential’ in approach.
On January 1, 2017, the Scottish Government launched its baby boxes, a policy personally driven forward by the First Minister.
Analysis showed a key group in any future independence referendum would be young mothers, hence the SNP’s emphasis on childcare issues.
Although there was no real evidence the boxes improved infant mortality, ministers made a point of selling the policy in those terms. It was at least an eyecatching policy, for it had been hard to strike a balance between bread-and-butter policy issues and the question of Brexit.
In several respects, the SNP’s reputation for ‘competence’ was under pressure. Andrew Robinson, a former NHS chief, blamed Sturgeon (when Health Secretary) for overturning his efficiency plans, while the UK Supreme Court ruled against aspects of the Named Person scheme.
On education, health, transport and local government Sturgeon’s administration appeared under constant attack for its failure to deliver.
On the economy, the annual publication of GERS [Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland] figures seemed to take the Scottish Government by surprise. ‘That money [Barnett] goes from Scotland to Westminster and comes back again’ was Sturgeon’s astonishingly simplistic response to a near-£15billion annual deficit.
Never comfortable talking about economics (unlike Salmond), Sturgeon also made vague speeches about ‘inclusive growth’ while Scotland’s growth figures remained stubbornly low.
‘It is Nicola Sturgeon’s tragedy to be the most effective politician in the UK,’ observed the Financial Times, ‘while lumbered with one of the least tenable economic prospectuses.’
When challenged on all this,
most visibly at the weekly First Minister’s Questions, Sturgeon often resembled her pugilistic predecessor, apparently affronted at such impertinence from her opponents.
Often it seemed as if the admirably wellbriefed SNP leader was more interested in a defensive ‘line’ rather than understanding the truth of a situation. The lawyer in her could effectively prosecute a case, whether or not it was empirically robust.
The SNP’s independence strategy was also seriously adrift, with little serious reflection on the outcome of the first referendum. ‘The period of Nicolamania was precisely the period in which to do the heavy lifting on independence,’ said one former adviser, ‘instead she [the First Minister] took selfies.’
Early last year, Sturgeon began to make dire (and rather silly) warnings about a Brexit ‘power grab’ undermining the very basis of Scottish devolution, while senior Nationalists such as Alex Neil, Kenny MacAskill and MEP Alyn Smith made a point of publicly cautioning against a push for Indyref 2, especially given – in the words of one insider – ‘we’d said nothing substantive about independence since 2014’.
There was contrary pressure from more impatient Nationalists, who argued that circumstances were unlikely to be as favourable in a few years’ time.
Wait until after the 2021 election, they warned, and there might not even be a pro-independence majority at Holyrood. The moment would have passed, leaving Sturgeon another leader in decline, full of regrets about what she might have done.
Finally, the media was summoned to Bute House on March 13, 2017. ‘At times like these,’ declared the First Minister, it was important ‘to be in control of events and not just at the mercy of them’.
Her efforts at compromise had been met ‘with a brick wall of intransigence’ and therefore she intended to seek the Scottish parliament’s authority to request formally a second independence referendum.
If, added the SNP leader, Scotland was to have a ‘real choice’, then when the terms of Brexit were known and before it was ‘too late to choose our own course’, Scots should have the opportunity to vote Yes or No to independence between the autumn of 2018 and the spring of 2019.
Once again, the once tentative Miss Sturgeon had thrown caution to the wind.