How Nicola fashioned another excuse to tell tales
IAM going to let you into a little secret. Most women, at one time or another, have fantasised about featuring in Vogue magazine. Why wouldn’t they? It’s Vogue after all, the bible of style, fashion and chi-chi elegance, where everything is glossy and soft focus, and there are few problems that can’t be solved with a few pieces of Louis Vuitton luggage and a lipstick that costs more than my mortgage payment.
I got this particular idyll out of my head at a young age, having been an avid collector of fashion magazines in my early teens. This was the first real supermodel era, when long-limbed beauties like Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell dominated the pages.
At 13 years old and 5ft 4in, I still hoped there might be room, quite literally, to grow to the towering heights of these Amazonian women. By 16 and having sprouted nary an inch, I realised there wasn’t, and moreover, that most women do not, and never will, look like Cindy Crawford.
These days, of course, Vogue’s pages feature plenty of women who have become famous for something other than their appearance. Like Nicola Sturgeon.
Sturgeon has, in fact, appeared in Vogue magazine twice, something she seemed all too keen to boast to Liz Truss when, last year, the Tory leadership candidate confidentially asked her: ‘How do you get into Vogue?’
‘I said to her they came and asked me. I didn’t really mean to do this, but I said it hadn’t actually been my first time in Vogue, it had been my second time,’ she told an Edinburgh Festival audience this week.
‘It looked a little bit as if she’d swallowed a wasp. I’m sure she’ll be in
Vogue before too long.’ Ooh, burn, as the kids might say.
Of course, it could be argued that Truss, who last week branded Sturgeon an ‘attention seeker’ and said that the best thing to do was ‘ignore her’, had it coming. But still. It was a cheap shot. Particularly given that Truss’s question appears to me to come from a place of nervous flattery, rather than showboating ambition.
Sturgeon has something of a habit of regurgitating private conversations with fellow politicians at a time calculated to inflict maximum damage.
In 2017 she ruffled Kezia Dugdale’s feathers by revealing that the former Scottish Labour leader had told her privately after the Brexit vote that she would drop opposition to a new independence referendum.
Meanwhile back in Edinburgh, she reminded the audience that she once described her conversations with Theresa May as ‘soul destroying’.
I must admit I find it a baffling approach. Politics is a lonely place, especially at the very top.
EVEN if you disagree on many things, I would have thought that a certain camaraderie might exist. A personal relationship can be beneficial to countries, too.
Private conversations should stay that way. If she continues in this manner, I worry that Sturgeon and Truss’s relationship, should she win, could see an all-time low in UK relations.
Perhaps Sturgeon is beyond caring. She is dropping hints that she may not contest the next Holyrood election. Maybe all this is simply the preview to a forthcoming autobiography.
If this is the calibre of the content however, it won’t be gracing my Amazon wish list. Or, I suspect, the hallowed pages of Vogue.