How Sturgeon has reinvented the SNP in just 100 days... and now poses an even bigger threat to the Union
THESE have been 100 adroit days for Nicola Sturgeon, with the odd moment of pure political audacity. She has already made her mark on London – a speech in the capital against the ‘ austerity agenda’ attracted widespread praise two weeks ago.
‘It helped that she had an argument,’ noted one commentator, stressing how lucky David Cameron was in facing Ed Miliband rather than Nicola Sturgeon. ‘It helped, too, that this argument was written in clear English. Unfashionably, her sentences even contained verbs.
‘And it was a clever speech, too – not least because it was more modest than a comparable speech given by her predecessor would probably have been.’
Miss Sturgeon’s standing in Scotland is such that she can fill the SECC Hydro faster than Beyoncé. According to the latest YouGov survey, 64 per cent of Scots think she is doing a good job. And with the SNP on a continued, astonishing roll, and a hung Parliament widely expected, the looming General Election is rich with possibility.
Yet there are nagging problems in Scotland’s public services. We have a new Scottish Labour leader who should by no means be underestimated – and a Westminster establishment that, as attested last September, can be most ruthless in defence of the United Kingdom.
Nor is Miss Sturgeon herself without vulnerability. She has not yet been seriously tested – and on occasion she is openly exasperated by her predecessor Alex Salmond, who seems incapable of glimpsing a spotlight without wanting to dance in it.
But such shadows should not detract from weeks in which the 44-year-old from Irvine has put scarcely a foot wrong.
She has yet to be unhorsed at First Minister’s Questions. She confounded Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson, for instance, by serenely agreeing to look into the possibility of aligning John Swinney’s new stamp duty bands with those subsequently announced by George Osborne. She did so, and the bands were duly aligned.
Miss Sturgeon has shown, besides, a fondness for cross-party consensus, where possible – and a pragmatic openness to new ideas. Wondering what Scotland’s troubled state secondary schools in our poorest postcodes might learn from the recent London Challenge programme, she visited the capital this week to study it in some detail – undeterred by angry hisses from the EIS teaching union, which seems to think that it, not the Scottish Government, should direct education policy.
She has been mocked in some quarters for putting gender-equality at the heart of her government, but much more drives this than feminism. She is keenly aware that women – as wives and partners, as mothers, as low-paid public sector workers – have been ‘the shock-absorbers of austerity’. From modest origins herself, the First Minister has a natural bent towards Scots struggling to make ends meet.
IT is, these days, a novel outlook when the Westminster Parliament spends more and more time discussing i ssues such as tax avoidance, the mansion tax, the ‘glass ceiling’ for women in FTSE-100 boardrooms – affecting only the sort of people who have hairdressers for their dogs.
There is a distinctive, political Sturgeon style. She is always formidably briefed, invariably on top of the subject of the hour. Often she seems not only better informed than a mere opponent but also terrifyingly better than the notionally responsible minister.
She never seems intimidated. She does not hate, or brood. ‘Uniquely among the senior politicians I have spoken to over the years,’ muses one veteran correspondent, ‘ she has never once briefed against anyone on her own side, nor even in private about her opponents. She is generous of spirit.’
Unlike Alex Salmond – who on occasion enjoyed the high hog in grand places and at our expense – she has modest tastes. Bute House, for her, is an office. She and her SNP chief executive husband Peter Murrell spend as few nights there as possible, retaining their own unremarkable house in Glasgow. On her first day at Bute House, Miss Sturgeon startled staff by searching for a broom and a Hoover, saying Peter wanted to tidy his room.
An ongoing burden is the cost of looking good, for women in politics fall under particularly pitiless scrutiny. She watches her weight keenly and, like Margaret Thatcher, has finally found a neat trademark style: in her case, vertiginous heels, a tailored skirt, a neatly tucked and usually tiny jacket.
She is not vain – at home, she prefers loose shirts and comfortable jeans – but she accepts that, today as always, power requires something of the theatre and the effective politician must dress for the part.
‘The SNP colours are yellow and black, but they’re really difficult to wear,’ she says candidly. ‘My favourite colour is red, and if I wear that someone will definitely say to me: “Those are Labour colours”. But I like red, and Labour doesn’t own it.’
She was one of the first politicians to grasp the power of Twitter, and uses it to incisive effect – if with great caution, explaining: ‘Don’t say anything on Twitter that you wouldn’t stand in front of a television camera and say.
‘I think that’s the mistake a lot of politicians make, they forget it is public and because there’s a feeling of privacy about it, they treat it as if they are talking to a pal in the pub… The second rule is don’t do it after you’ve had a glass of wine.’
One could examine much else – her ease among the general public, her poise and warmth after the George Square bin-lorry tragedy, a contrasting wariness around journalists – but the most welcome thing, perhaps, is how completely different Nicola Sturgeon is from Alex Salmond.
Her predecessor, aptly damned by the Evening Standard as the sort of politician ‘who’d shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die’, has an abiding weakness for the cheap dig and the low blow. Moreover, he is pugnacious. As one senior Nationalist who has known both of them for decades puts it, a tad wearily: ‘You could present each with the same proposal and Sturgeon would seek an agreement because it made sense, while Salmond would pick a fight because it was fun.’
The Sturgeon instinct always is to negotiate, to disarm, to avoid unnecessary scraps. She is easy to work for. In public, she never patronises, never erupts. But push her hard, and you might get The Withering Glance of the Ice Goddess.
SHE is not just a generational change from Mr Salmond, but a geographical one. He is very much an east coast figure, bound up with bankers, oil economics, farming, fishing, haar. She is grounded in Glasgow and west-central Scotland. She is more obviously of the Left and, today, has far broader electoral appeal.
Now she strides into a spring of delicious possibilities. The General Election is but 70 days away. The SNP is extraordinarily disciplined, remarkably united. By the end of last year – and in just three months – its membership had quadrupled. It is widely expected to gain seats, perhaps a lot of seats, in
the House of Commons, and should beat Labour in Scotland’s popular vote.
Miss Sturgeon has approached the election with care. She caused some London alarm – though, of course, winning much helpful London attention – by letting it be known that, for the first time in the SNP’s Parliamentary history, its MPs may choose on occasion to vote on legislation affecting only England and Wales.
She has besides ruled out any deal of any kind with David Cameron and the Tory Party and has floated the possibility of a post-election deal with Ed Miliband and Labour, in exchange for a programme of ‘progressive government,’ even more powers for Scotland, and the removal of Trident from the Clyde.
This talk is not just ambrosial to the ears of your typical SNP activist but is likely to cement the support which the Nationalists whipped up during the referendum campaign in traditional Labour bastions.
Naturally, appalled Scottish Labour MPs are calling on their London leadership to rule out such a deal with Miss Sturgeon. But Mr Miliband has so far refused to do so – conscious of his party’s woefully weak position in Scotland, and also his own – even David Cameron is more popular this side of the Border.
This leaves Miss Sturgeon and her party handsomely placed. If thousands of traditional Labour voters feel that they can vote Nationalist and still have a Labour Government, the SNP stands to win dozens of seats.
But if Mr Miliband is prevailed upon to exclude any deal, and the Nationalists still win dozens of seats, it greatly weakens his chance of forming a government. As Miss Sturgeon told a London paper this week: ‘Ed Miliband would have to explain why he turned his back on the agreement and why he would not pursue a progressive political alliance; why he would prefer to let the Tories govern…’
The SNP’s dream scenario is another term of Tory government, but one for which the Nationalists cannot possibly be blamed. We would then face five more years of ideologically opposed administrations in Edinburgh and London, with abundant real (or manufactured) tensions and, of course, Mr Cameron’s ill-advised referendum on our engagement with Europe.
It is quite conceivable that Scotland could vote to stay in the EU, England vote to flounce out… and the moral and political case then, for a second independence referendum, would be irresistible. Not five years after becoming First Minister, Miss Sturgeon could have finished the Union.
‘In summation,’ muses one observer and reluctant admirer, ‘she’s playing a brilliant tactical game that’s destroying Scottish Labour, cementing the SNP as the natural party of government and helping the Tories win the election, which is the result that best suits the Nationalists.
‘You have to admire her wily ways – in many ways better than Salmond’s. He was all guns blazin ing. She’s the stealthy assassin.’ Yet ahead lie potential pitfalls. A particular worry for Miss Sturgeon is the air of mounting crisis in NHS Scotland – not least with Labour’s efforts to publicise as many problems as possible, and because for six years she was the relevant minister. Shattering embarrassment here would dent her authority permanently.
ALSO there is unease about the unified and belligerent force of Police Scotland. And there i s real worry about t he devolved budget in the years ahead, with greater tax powers affording much l ess advantage than Holyrood control of social security and, for instance, corporation tax.
Occasionally, Miss Sturgeon does give cause to doubt her judgment. At the turn of the year, she not only served as a witness at Scotland’s first samesex marriage, but also posed for photographs with the happy couple and the leering Patrick Harvie, our most aggressively at atheistic MSP.
Supporting the measure is one th thing; glorying in it quite another. It was a mistake Mr Salmond w would not have made, and reflects Miss Sturgeon’s inability to comprehend strong religious co conviction or socially conservative outlook – ways of life and of thought beyond the Glasgow wine bars.
She was, besides, elected to the leadership unopposed. While this is scarcely her fault, but denied th the SNP what could have been worthwhile and soul- searching debate, not least identifying theh key errors in its referendum ca campaign. More seriously, Miss Sturgeon herself has yet to be tested by the sort of sustained adversity, challenges and widespread hate that proved the steel of Margaret Thatcher.
The ‘stealthy assassin’ faces formidable enemies. Even now, disapproving newspapers talk up SNP election prospects, the better later to headline slight opinion-poll slippage as entire tailspin, or to portray anything short of 40 SNP seats Westminster as a reeling disappointment.
Mathematically, it i s most unlikely that Nationalist MPs would hold the balance of power, and unlikely that Labour would be particularly eager to negotiate, especially after bloody Scottish losses. Demanding the removal of Trident is simply not the stuff of serious politics – especially at a time of renewed Russian aggression. Meanwhile, in the old, wily Empire-hardened culture of Westminster and Whitehall, there is sufficient and unscrupulous guile to run effortless rings around the SNP.
In the past the party has had trouble keeping control of its MPs, most infamously in 1979. It is by no means clear who would call the shots or sit down and negotiate with potential allies, particularly if Mr Salmond returns to the Commons. A hundred days in, 70 to go… but events, dear woman, events. And your incorrigible, unpredictable predecessor.