The final curtain: Stephen Daisley
She’s fighting for her political life after being accused of misleading parliament. Her party is mired in sleaze and accusations of sexual harassment. Nicola Sturgeon now faces 72 hours that could finish her leadership — and destroy her dreams of independ
WHEN she stepped into the spotlight at the Glasgow Hydro in November 2014, Nicola Sturgeon had 12,000 adoring fans hanging on her every word and an entire country at her feet. The newly installed First Minister was unscathed by defeat in the independence referendum two months earlier.
In fact, it had been the making of her, a political star now on the cusp of a historic electoral triumph at Westminster.
They came from every corner of the country to hear her, to see her, to be in the presence. The venue said pop concert; the atmosphere, tent ministry. The sizzling beams above illuminated a small, poised figure, cloaked in tartan, her hands held aloft as though casting some sorcery over the crowd. Behind her, a gargantuan screen bore the word: ‘Nicola’. Mononymy: the hallmark of rock stars and messiahs.
More than six years on, the First Minister stands in the glare of a harsher light. Neither celebrity nor saviour, she has been shown to be the one thing her most ardent followers swore she could never be: just another politician.
This politician, however, faces a week like no other in Scottish politics, at least not since devolution. What the First Minister and the Scottish Government are accused of is not a muddle, nor even a fiddle, but a fundamental breach of trust.
It has already been established that they failed two women who came forward with complaints against Alex Salmond. They failed them by allowing a civil servant who had prior contact with them to investigate their accusations.
It has already been established that they failed Salmond, who was, despite and because of the seriousness of the allegations against him, entitled to process. They failed him by investigating him in a manner that was ‘unlawful’, ‘procedurally unfair’ and ‘tainted by apparent bias’.
It is a matter of fact, too, that they failed the taxpaying public. They failed them by behaving so egregiously in the judicial review that the Court of Session awarded Salmond more than £500,000 in costs.
The questions that hang over them now are whether they failed in their duty to the Holyrood inquiry and parliament and whether Sturgeon failed to abide by the letter and spirit of the ministerial code.
THESE questions come after the Scottish Government’s defeat in civil court, Salmond’s acquittal in criminal court and an inquiry that, despite government obstruction and Crown Office intervention, brought into the public domain charges of the gravest kind seen in UK politics in generations.
Charges that Salmond was the victim of a plot by high-ranking SNP and Scottish Government figures to see him imprisoned. Charges that the identity of a complainant was vouchsafed to one of Salmond’s associates. Charges that documents were withheld in the teeth of a search warrant. The word ‘scandal’ seems almost trite. In the coming days, Sturgeon will be battling not only for her own political life but for that of her government and her party. Ahead of her lie three minefields, studded with munitions left there by her own actions and those of her administration.
The first gamut she will run is the Holyrood inquiry report. This will focus on how her government handled complaints against Salmond and, as Thursday night’s leak confirmed, will conclude she did mislead MSPs. She will try to survive on the technicality that the committee, as far as we know, has not said she misled ‘knowingly’.
The second front will come when former Irish prosecutor James Hamilton returns his verdict. The barrister has been tasked with determining whether Sturgeon contravened the ministerial code.
The code holds that: ‘Ministers who knowingly mislead the parliament will be expected to offer their resignation.’ The foreword to the rulebook, penned by Sturgeon herself, asserts that ‘it is essential to set and maintain the highest standards of propriety’ and contains this personal pledge: ‘I will lead by example in following the letter and spirit of this code, and I expect that ministers and civil servants will do likewise.’
For all that she has sought to portray herself as the victim of this process, Sturgeon is being asked to do nothing more than hold to her word. She will, nonetheless, go out of her way to evade and deflect. The third and final minefield to cross is on Wednesday. High noon. The end of the road for this parliament, and perhaps, this First Minister.
As the last sitting day before Holyrood rises for the election, it will be the final opportunity for the opposition to bring a motion of no confidence in Sturgeon. The Tories are threatening to do just that – unless Sturgeon resigns before then. When the Presiding Officer sends them home on Wednesday afternoon, everything between then and May 6 will be about the election.
The election is, of course, what lies on the other side of those minefields. Even if Sturgeon somehow reaches it unscathed – or at least as walking-wounded – she faces almost two months of questions about what she did, what those around her did, what she knew and when she knew it.
These questions do not pertain only to the Salmond affair: there is now an established pattern of scandal in the SNP.
Derek Mackay, the finance
secretary, was forced to resign on the eve of the 2020 Budget over texts sent to a 16-year-old. Mackay, previously tipped as Sturgeon’s successor, sent 270 missives to the teenager and faced calls from the boy’s mother to quit.
MARK McDonald, a Scottish Government minister, was banished after sending inappropriate messages. He resigned from the Government and later the SNP but one of the women involved maintained Holyrood ought to remove him from parliament.
Patrick Grady, the Westminster chief whip, quit his post following harassment allegations from party workers. He continues to sit as a Nationalist MP and Sturgeon has conceded she had ‘an awareness of a concern’ in advance.
Margaret Ferrier lost the parliamentary whip but remains a party member six months after travelling from Glasgow to London by train with Covid-19 symptoms then making the return journey in the wake of a positive test for the virus. The Rutherglen and Hamilton West MP appeared at Glasgow Sheriff Court last month charged with culpable and reckless conduct but entered no plea.
Rural Economy Secretary Fergus Ewing is under investigation over the alleged bullying of two civil servants. Earlier this month, a newspaper reported new allegations that the minister, a member of the SNP-royalty Ewing dynasty, ‘put undue pressure on officials to make payments that they did not deem to be appropriate’.
While no complaint has been formalised, the paper said ‘a senior Scottish Government official’ had ‘escalated’ concerns in relation to the £40million Scottish Suckler Beef Support Scheme. Ewing denies any wrongdoing.
A mephitic odour clings to the Nationalists. The question is whether the stench will be enough to put voters off giving the SNP a fourth term in government. The polls have long predicted victory but more recent surveys hint that an outright majority is slipping from their grasp. Trust is the most precious commodity in politics and where Sturgeon was once rolling in it, she finds herself in a bear market with her stock plummeting. Her halo has at last been knocked off and shattered to pieces.
The first order of Sturgeon’s fightback has been to attack the Holyrood committee. Sturgeon once promised to ‘fully co-operate with the committee and its inquiry’; now her office briefs that ‘the committee appears to have resorted to baseless assertion, supposition and smear’ and is ‘simply exposing their base political motives’.
Undermining the Holyrood inquiry lets Sturgeon shift the emphasis to the Hamilton inquiry. Given how often she and other ministers cite it as the ultimate verdict on these matters, they evidently have great confidence in it.
Next will be framing the committee, and everyone else demanding accountability from Sturgeon, as enemies of independence out to do down Scotland’s foremost champion of sovereignty. This is selfserving, arrant nonsense and as a strategy it puts the First Minister in a bind. She wants this to be a Covid election, for it is as the face of the pandemic response that she draws down much of her support.
A split-focus campaign, veering from coronavirus to independence and back again, risks making the SNP look rattled and could well push away voters uninterested in talk of another referendum.
What the opposition can be certain of is that this will be the nastiest, ugliest, most personal election of devolution. No holds barred, no pleasantries. Bare-knuckle combat to the death.
Nicola Sturgeon joined the SNP in 1987 and spent nearly three decades clambering her way to the top, to where all the power was. After all that effort, the idea she is going to give up power without a fight is rankly naive. It is not who she is.
This takes us to the third pillar of her fightback: Sturgeon the feminist avenger. The broadside from her office dropped a sizeable hint of this strategy when it lamented: ‘Sadly, she is not the first woman let down by a man she once trusted to face that charge, and regrettably she is unlikely to be the last.’
It was there to hear at First Minister’s Questions, too, when she cast herself as a victim of an ‘old boys’ club’ consisting of ‘Alex Salmond and his cronies’, including his ‘old pal’ David Davis. Not so long ago, she was Salmond’s ‘old pal’ and one of his ‘cronies’.
The same Salmond of whom she once said: ‘The personal debt of gratitude I owe Alex is immeasurable. He has been my friend, mentor and colleague for more than 20 years. Quite simply, I would not have been able to do what I have in politics without his constant advice, guidance and support through all these years.’ She even called him ‘the finest First Minister Scotland has had’.
These efforts to portray herself as a latter-day Gloria Steinem are as convincing as were her frequent bouts of amnesia before the Holyrood inquiry. The electorate is wise to such tactics. The public is likelier to believe the committee over the subject of its investigation.
NOR will they buy that this is all a grand conspiracy against independence. Salmond can hardly be considered a shill for the British state.
These lines also fail a simple test: relevance. Sturgeon said during FMQs this week: ‘In just a few weeks’ time, I will put myself before the verdict of the Scottish people. That is the ultimate accountability.’ That is not how our system works. We are a parliamentary democracy, not a republic. We elect MSPs who elect a First Minister. We do not go to the polls to choose a president. Sturgeon is rehearsing her lines for an Oprah interview that is not coming.
The viability test of Sturgeon continuing in office has already been laid out by Sturgeon herself. When it emerged that Wendy Alexander’s 2007 Scottish Labour leadership campaign had accepted a £950 donation from a businessman based in Jersey, Sturgeon called her position ‘untenable’ before any inquiry had been held.
She declared: ‘None of the questions posed have been answered, none of the issues settled. Wendy Alexander certainly can’t hide behind an Electoral Commission inquiry and likely forthcoming police inquiry without answering any of the obvious questions: who knew what, when and how.’
Anyone waiting for the First Minister to apply that standard to herself will be waiting for some time.
These are events Sturgeon can control, or at least try to, but there are others outwith her grasp. If she misled parliament, she did not do so merely as First Minister, resignation-warranting though that is. She did so also as leader of the SNP and figurehead of the proindependence movement.
If she misrepresented the facts to the committee, how can we be sure she isn’t doing the same with NHS waiting times, crime figures or school funding? If she misled Holyrood about her involvement in the Salmond inquiry, how can we know she isn’t misleading us on the economics of independence, her currency proposals or the likelihood of a separate Scotland applying for EU membership? If Holyrood can’t trust her, why should we?
As she hunkers down in the ruins of her premiership – plotting, spinning, strategising – she must wonder how she got from that dizzying day at the Hydro to here.