Like Mrs Thatcher, she may survive... but politically she is damaged goods

IT WAS Monday, January 27, 1986, and one Ronald Millar was helping Margaret Thatcher prepare a speech. In the wake of the Westland affair – leaks, splits, venomous secret briefings, the Cabinet resignations of Michael Heseltine and Leon Brittan – her strain was apparent.

‘Ronald,’ she said, ‘I might not be Prime Minister by six o’clock tonight, if things go badly…’

Thatcher, as so often, was lucky in her opponent. Neil Kinnock made so windy, illprepared and fatuous a speech that, as his own Labour benches seethed with frustration, Tory MPs rallied behind the Iron Lady.

Despite what had happened – her hands on everything and her fingerprints on nothing – Margaret Thatcher survived. Yet things were never quite the same again.

Her moral authority had been eroded, her feet of clay exposed – and always, at the margins, Heseltine would thereafter prowl, waiting for his chance to strike.

I have said very little in recent months about the Sturgeon-Salmond imbroglio – and I have known some of the people involved for many years – because, and surely I am not alone in this, so little about it makes sense.

By the end of March last year, Alex Salmond had won twice over and made Nicola Sturgeon and her administration look dodgy, even ridiculous.

He had early in 2019 easily beaten them in the civil court – and last spring was acquitted of all criminal charges by a jury that was composed largely of women.

What has he to gain by pursuing such a subsequent vendetta, to such a degree that threatens – politically – the party and the cause he has served all his life and makes him look obsessive, vindictive and cheap?

And why would Sturgeon, her husband, certain colleagues and senior civil servants go to such alleged – and fantastic – lengths, from the autumn of 2017, to enmire and destroy the prince they had served for so long?

By then, Alex Salmond was emphatically yesterday’s man. He had in that year’s general election lost his Gordon seat. (It was regained for the SNP at the late Christmas election, easily, by some nonentity.)

A subsequent, Salmond one-man show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is best remembered for coarse jokes about prominent female politicians. And he signed up – for many roubles – with the RT channel, a front for the Russian state.

Salmond, once the brightest star in Scotland’s political firmament, now closes his career on the payroll of Vladimir the Underpants Poisoner.

Even if – as, that 2017 autumn, was feared – he was eyeing SNP candidacy in a putative Aberdeen Donside by-election for the Scottish parliament, there were perfectly straightforward ways of preventing it.

Journalists were actually briefed – not that SNP spads needed to mention Salmond’s name – that, if a by-election happened, after the disgrace of Mark McDonald Sturgeon, sensitive to the optics as always, would insist on a women-only shortlist.

Vilified

It is too easy to forget just how dreadful things remain for women in public life. It is as if their very success infuriates a certain sort of man into trying to do them down.

A succession of women have been vilified merely for the enormity of being married to a politician.

Women in Parliament are trolled with threats of rape, threats to their lives. And we remain extraordinarily fascinated by their appearance. Little was said last week, about Salmond’s unremarkable suit. But we instinctively, yesterday, noticed Sturgeon’s spare make-up, the striking absence of jewellery, and her tailored suit in the vivid scarlet of Red Clydeside.

It was, for the most part, an assured, well-rehearsed performance. One was particularly impressed by the deftly timed chuckles, amidst regretted lapses of memory and avowed points of sorrow.

In all, as slippery an outing as the Salmond/Sturgeon drama has been so fishy a tale.

But, whatever we may think or suspect, and however dented her credibility, it is most unlikely to be the finish of her.

We forget how, over the past year of Covid, Nicola Sturgeon has for many Scots become almost part of the family.

My parents – who have never voted SNP in their lives – no longer call her ‘Sturgeon.’ Near daily, my mother summons my father to sit in front of the TV ‘and hear what Nicola is saying today’.

I need not enlarge on the wider, disgraceful failures of her administration – on health, in education, in public transport, its assaults on faith and family and free speech.

There have been bad mistakes in the coronavirus emergency, too.

But at least, with this First Minister, we have always felt there was a grown-up in the room, compared to the shambles we too often witnessed down south.

You know the strain of everything – and especially the Holyrood investigation – has been getting to Nicola Sturgeon because, too frequently, in recent months she has flared into personal nastiness.

When William and Kate briefly visited Scotland, the First Minister responded gracelessly.

She assailed the Prime Minister, on his recent jaunt, for the enormity of visiting part of the United Kingdom he commands, and as if he needed he permission to do so.

She has, once and twice, even flayed Ruth Davidson for daring to question her, Sturgeon, in the Scottish parliament, when she, Davidson, is shortly to sashay off to the House of Lords.

It is most unlikely that the

Holyrood inquiry will ever get to the bottom of how the two architects of recent SNP triumph fell so foully out and to what extent – and how consciously – folk in grey kilts greased the skids in an attempt to encompass Alex Salmond’s ruin.

After all, it was never meant to – and events over the past ten days, especially, raise troubling questions about the probity and accountability of the way Scotland is governed.

But the sustained shiftiness, evasion, and at times too evident contempt for the Scottish parliament have left this SNP administration looking diminished and a less than candid First Minister clearly damaged.

Flailing

She would not welcome comparisons with Mrs Thatcher, but there are striking parallels. Both were of modest birth in provincial towns, both attained the political peak in a system gamed much to the favour of men, both went through flailing, failing ministers like Kleenex and, like Thatcher, Sturgeon works unsparingly hard.

She is said to leave her Glasgow home every morning at 5.30am on commute to government – and she has now been First Minister for more than six years.

In normal times, men would already be murmuring, ‘Don’t you think she looks rather tired?’ and sidling close to the obvious, stand-out successor.

But our times are not normal and – unless Angus Robertson sails home, in a few weeks, in Edinburgh Central – there is no dazzling alternative.

Yet, while the SNP will probably win May’s election – perhaps even with that coveted overall majority – there is now a distinct horizon to Sturgeon’s future fortunes.

One day during the 1987 general election, there was a troubling opinion poll or two and Margaret Thatcher completely lost the plot, shrieking and shouting at her lieutenants as they quailed before her.

Willie Whitelaw, who knew evaporating political judgment when he saw it, looked quietly on, and afterwards murmured: ‘There goes a woman who will never fight another election.’

And she never did.