Sturgeon at 50
By her own admission a politician to her very fingertips, the First Minister has dedicated her entire working life to the pursuit of a single aim. But as she enters her sixth decade, and the Covid crisis continues to tilt the world on its axis, is she finally beginning to re-evaluate her true priorities?
SHE is, by her own declaration, a politician to her fingertips. Naturally, then, in response to the cringe-inducing Birthday Clap for Nicola threatened for tomorrow, the First Minister will make all the right political noises. There will be a tickled-pink ‘oh stoppit’ quality to her reaction and, of course, she will be clear that health workers and carers are the truly deserving causes.
Nicola Sturgeon will be touched, humbled, honoured and not a little embarrassed to be saluted on doorsteps across her land, albeit the applause will come almost exclusively from long-time converts to her core cause.
Comfortable in her own skin as she claims to be these days, part of her probably won’t know quite where to look.
But a much more private and calculating part of her – the inner politician – will be looking carefully at what it all means.
On surveying the state of her nation and her place in it on her 50th birthday tomorrow, there will certainly be cause for quiet satisfaction.
She will note, for example, that her approval rating has never been higher. It stands at +60 compared to Boris Johnson’s -39 and reflects the fact that, presentationally at least, her handling of the coronavirus crisis has been, by some distance, the more successful.
Miss Sturgeon has managed both to make great play of putting party politics to one side during a health emergency and to make subtle political capital from the areas where her and Scotland’s narrative may diverge from that of Boris Johnson and the rest of the UK.
On any analysis, the measured caution of her approach has played more effectively in these months of lockdown than the meandering, sometimes muddled tone of Mr Johnson’s pandemic oratory.
Her instinct to place herself at the front and centre of Scotland’s daily briefings throughout the crisis was, in retrospect, also politically shrewd, reinforcing her status as the empathetic yet tough-decision-making leader.
Mr Johnson’s preference for delegating the task risked painting him, by contrast, as remote, even furtive.
And, for all the well-wishing that went on, the fact that he and key lieutenants contrived to contract the virus themselves hardly instilled confidence.
A 50th birthday glance at the opinion polls on independence, the issue that, all her political life, gets her out of bed in the morning, will bring yet more cheer.
The past few months, we remind ourselves, were not a popularity contest but a global health crisis in which, to quote Miss Sturgeon, ‘we are all on the same side’.
YET such is the perceived scale of her victory over Mr Johnson in being on the same side as him that 54 per cent of Scots are now said to favour independence, an unprecedented high. The figure rises to almost 70 per cent among 16 to 34-year-olds.
Coronavirus, that seismic bolt from the blue which for months made an irrelevance of Scottish independence, has, paradoxically, proved a fillip for the movement.
And yet as Miss Sturgeon blushingly weathers the faithful’s 50th birthday huzzahs, the outlook is considerably more unsettled than they would have her believe. And her inner politician knows it.
She knows, for example, that ahead lie bloody battles not only with the usual opposition suspects but within her own party, now engulfed in civil war on multiple fronts.
Indeed, in the next Scottish parliamentary election campaign she is likely to be competing for Nationalist votes not just with the Greens but with a new SNP breakaway party called the Alliance for Independence.
It is not inconceivable that this outfit will be led by her former friend and mentor Alex Salmond.
Looking ahead to her 50s, Miss Sturgeon may have given credence to a wealth of political possibilities – including undoubtedly the failure of her lifetime’s ambition to achieve independence – but the prospect of Mr Salmond standing in the way of that prime objective surely never entered her wildest imaginings.
She cut her political teeth in his shadow, was nurtured by him and, when the time came, he groomed her for greatness. It was Mr Salmond who, in 2004, rescued her from certain defeat when she stood against Roseanna Cunningham to replace John Swinney as party leader.
By throwing his hat in the ring himself and convincing her to run as his deputy, he set her on a credible path to party leadership.
It was his support base which propelled the SNP into government and he, above all, who carved a hole in the Union defence and gave Nationalists a clear shot on the independence goal.
Now, smarting from the humiliation of a two-week trial on multiple charges of sexual assault – not one of which was upheld by the jury – he is hellbent on having his side of the story heard.
He is out to prove a concerted campaign to thwart his return to frontline politics; he means to establish this as the motivation for the catalogue of charges brought by his accusers.
The chances are that, as Miss Sturgeon’s thoughts return to business-as-usual politics, it is this enemy that frightens her more than any on the opposition benches.
There is much else besides to bring sleepless nights. While Miss Sturgeon may have benefited politically from taking the daily coronavirus briefings herself, the chief reason why it was a no-brainer to do so was the paucity of talent in her team.
Even her trusty right-hand man, Deputy First Minister and Education Secretary John Swinney, has proved leadenfooted during the crisis, talking his party into all sorts of problems over children’s phased return to school and the calamitous blended learning programme before being forced to talk himself out of it again.
Meanwhile, Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf was last week forced to write to MSPs on the Scottish parliament’s health and sport committee to ‘clarify’
his claim from June 23 that ‘approximately 20 per cent of travellers’ had been contacted by health officials to check if they had developed coronavirus symptoms since arriving in Scotland. Somewhat predictably, the true figure was zero.
Another member of this uninspiring supporting cast is Health Secretary Jeane Freeman, whose remit makes her the obvious Scottish Government spokesman on the pandemic.
Certainly she is afforded a semiregular place on Miss Sturgeon’s briefings podium. Yet the First Minister’s understandable tendency to dominate the airtime with her superior communication skills makes it easy to forget her Health Secretary is even present.
Indeed, in some respects, Miss Sturgeon faces a similar problem to her predecessor. At 50, closing in on six years in the job of First Minister, a senior member of the Government for 13 years and a politician virtually her entire adult life, she is vastly more experienced than the rest of her team and, with the exception of the affable Mr Swinney, most of her party’s biggest hitters lie outside it, plotting trouble or biding their time for leadership bids.
But even Miss Sturgeon, if she is honest with herself, has fallen far short of the sure-footed matriarch keeping us all safe these past few months with Caledonian caution and common sense.
If that is who her doorstep cheerleaders think they are applauding then they will not, surely, have relatives locked up in care homes and exposed to coronavirus by the catastrophic decision to decant elderly patients, untested, from hospitals into their environs.
they will not be haunted, as Miss Sturgeon admitted she would be, by the 900-plus pensioners bundled out of hospitals to make room for a tsunami of Covid-19 patients which never came – or the fact they were sent to care homes before testing for the virus was mandatory for such transfers.
In hindsight, admitted Miss Sturgeon in late May, she should have reached ‘a different conclusion’.
By early June, the number of coronavirus deaths in Scottish care homes had overtaken the number in hospitals.
there were other, highly contentious, missteps: her doomed attempt to retain Chief Medical Officer Catherine Calderwood in post following her lockdownbusting visits to her second home in Fife when she should have ordered her immediate resignation; the whiff of cover-up which surrounds February’s Nike conference in Edinburgh where dozens of people may have contracted the virus but ‘patient confidentiality guidelines’ prevented the outbreak from being made public.
Only in Scotland, some might ruefully reflect, would a political leader implicated in keeping details of coronavirus’s ground zero from her countryfolk be rewarded months later with fawning applause for looking after us.
And yet, as she well understands, it is her party’s brand of politics – the good versus evil of Nationalism versus unionism – which engenders this quasi-religious devotion to a cause, which brings blindness to its failures and hallelujahs to the faintest sniff of success.
It is the binary option of yes or no, which for close to a decade has coloured politics in Scotland, leaving little room on either side for equivocation.
You either applaud Miss Sturgeon on her 50th birthday because she is a Nationalist who has given her all to keep her people from harm, or you lament such silliness as the antics of true believers whose critical faculties have deserted them.
the truth is that, having declared candidly that she and her government would make mistakes in their handling of coronavirus, that is exactly what they went ahead and did – often being less than forthcoming in admitting it. Elsewhere, Miss Sturgeon’s judgment proved as sure as one might expect of a diligent, well-briefed and now vastly experienced political leader.
Indeed, as she enters her sixth decade, it may be more instructive to consider how Miss Sturgeon measures the job she is doing, the politics around her and the progress towards her independence goal, than the diametrically opposed views of most of her public.
Is the social justice campaigner and equality stickler within her comfortable, for example, with the creeping nationalism of Scotland’s cultural institutions, with the animosity shown towards figures such as historian Neil Oliver, the outgoing chairman of the National trust for Scotland whose unionist sympathies have marked him out as a prime target?
CAN the Ayrshire lass with English blood running in her veins and, as she insisted this week, not ‘an anti-English bone in my body’ reconcile the hatred her party has awoken in sections of the population not just for the English but for fellow Scots who still desire to be in a union with them?
In the post-Covid era, will her appetite for political battle remain as insatiable as ever? there has been, for decades, little in Miss Sturgeon’s life besides politics. She does not cook or drive; not since her early 20s – and then only for a year or two – has she experienced employment outside of politics; her husband is Peter Murrell, chief executive officer of the party she leads; there are no children; hobbies are few, and time for them lately non-existent.
And yet, fascinatingly, there is evidence of an ache to be someone who is not a politician to her fingertips, clues to an impatience with the ‘game’ which increasingly characterises her profession.
the experience of leading her nation through the pandemic, she said in an interview this month, is ‘shifting my perspective on things’.
She added: ‘It’s making me re-evaluate what’s important in life and what’s maybe not quite so important, and I think it probably is lowering my tolerance to some of the nonsense of politics.’
the modern brand of politics, she admitted, is less about the battle of ideas than about ‘chucking mud at each other and forcing yourself to always believe the worst of your opponent.
‘I think my tolerance of that, certainly at the moment, is a bit lower than it was previously and, who knows, I might get over that but I hope not in some ways.’
the Nicola Sturgeon who came to prominence in the 1990s set about her political work on a small handful of operational modes. Irritation, indignation and outrage just about covered the full gamut.
Will her 50s finally bring her face to face with the reality that her opponents have hopes and dreams for their country too – and much besides to contribute to it?
that really would be a journey worth applauding.