How Nicola lost her grip... and half a million votes
In part two of a major update to his Sturgeon biography, David Torrance examines the SNP’s disastrous general election... and its tumultuous aftermath
DURING Nicola Sturgeon’s prolonged honeymoon, she was celebrated for her ability to judge and articulate the moment, apparently speaking on behalf of the nation. On March 13, 2017, however, the First Minister spectacularly misjudged the public mood with her call for a second independence referendum.
Beyond the Nationalist faithful, there was no discernable response to the SNP leader’s call to arms. Instead, three days later, someone else appeared to capture the mood more intuitively. Embarrassingly for Sturgeon, that person was Theresa May, a Conservative Prime Minister. ‘Now,’ she declared, ‘is not the time’.
Undeterred, Sturgeon pressed on, presumably calculating that her speech to the SNP’s spring conference and a Holyrood debate on March 28 would maintain momentum. She also secretly met business leaders at Bute House with a view to winning their support. There, too, she appeared to have misjudged the mood. ‘I think the vast majority of us left’, said one of those present, ‘fearing more for the economy than when we arrived’.
Even when MSPs debated the plan, the First Minister appeared to be going through the motions, recycling her conference speech and studying her iPad during desultory exchanges. At one point, when Sturgeon attempted to intervene during a speech by Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Conservative leader snapped: ‘Sit down!’ It was a quite a moment – Davidson had spoken on behalf of weary No voters angered by talk of another referendum.
At the end of that debate, MSPs voted by a majority of 69-59 to support that course of action. But if that renewed ‘mandate’ – as the SNP called it – was supposed to change the UK Government’s mind, it had little effect. The next day, Westminster formally triggered the Article 50 process to take Scotland and the rest of the UK out of the EU.
NICOLA Sturgeon promised to update MSPs on ‘progressing the will of parliament’ after the Easter recess. But shortly after the First Minister returned from a US tour on April 18 Theresa May surprised almost everyone by calling a ‘snap’ general election, and that update never took place.
The election appeared to catch the SNP off guard and its campaign struggled to find a coherent theme. Sometimes it was about independence and sometimes it wasn’t, the latter scarcely credible given Sturgeon’s recent call for a second vote. Ultimately, she simply fell back on the vacuous 2015 slogan of ‘Stronger for Scotland’, promising to protect Scotland from the hateful Tories.
Local government elections, meanwhile, were due on May 4. In England, these appeared to confirm the Conservatives were on course for a landslide victory in June, while in Scotland there was further evidence of a Tory revival. ‘We said no,’ ran the Scottish Conservatives’ straightforward campaign. ‘We meant it.’ The SNP, meanwhile, finally took control of Glasgow City Council, yet it was clear the party had peaked.
Another problem was heightened scrutiny of the SNP’s record, having recently marked ten years in office. Whenever the First Minister appeared on television, she appeared to come under attack. A nurse called Claire Austin, for example, told Sturgeon she relied on foodbanks to make ends meet.
Newspapers later probed Austin’s foodbank claim (pictures emerged of her holidaying in New York and dining in some style), but a Twitter rumour that she was related to a Conservative councillor caused a row. Nationalist MP (and QC) Joanna Cherry was forced to apologise after repeating this peculiarly Scottish smear on television. Later, Sturgeon said she’d made an ‘honest mistake’, which rather implied the attacks would have been justified had the Tory connection been true.
When it came to another key policy responsibility, as journalist Fraser Nelson noted, Sturgeon’s tactic was to ‘drag any discussion about education into the land of acronyms and statistics’.
Reports from the ground campaign, meanwhile, suggested the First Minister also provoked strong reactions on the doorstep, ‘that woman’ being among the politer epithets, a description once applied to Mrs Thatcher.
The SNP leader’s final tour of Scotland in the branded ‘Nicolopter’, once a novelty, just made her look aloof and out of touch. And as the polls shifted in Labour’s favour, Sturgeon’s soundbites descended into palpable nonsense. ‘If you like Jeremy Corbyn’, she appeared to tell voters on the eve of poll, ‘vote SNP’.
Panic at the Labour bounce also helped explain another key moment of the campaign when, in a second leaders’ debate on STV, the First Minister suggested Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale had told her, in a phone call after the EU referendum, that her party might consider dropping its opposition to another independence ballot. Once renowned for relative straight-dealing, Sturgeon was now divulging the contents of official (and therefore private) government business live on air.
On polling day, the SNP lost 21 seats and half a million votes. Even more humiliatingly, a dozen of those constituencies were lost to the Tories, who for the first time in a quarter of a century returned more than one MP. The SNP not only lost its deputy leader, Angus Robertson, but its former leader, Alex Salmond, in Gordon. No longer did Sturgeon, the undisputed star of the 2015 general election, appear to be ‘the most dangerous woman in Britain’.
THE First Minister’s Brexit strategy had been put to voters twice and found wanting. Not only that, but the outcome turned several longstanding Nationalist orthodoxies on their head: that Scots were inherently anti-Tory, that a Left-wing Labour Party couldn’t win a UK election and, more surprisingly, that Brexit would increase support for the SNP and independence.
That meant the prospect of a second referendum was ‘off the table’ before at least 2021. After promising to ‘reflect’ on her losses, however, Sturgeon announced a strategic ‘reset’ that turned out to be little more than a tweak to her preferred timescale. All now hinged upon the outcome of Brexit, the SNP promising to redouble its efforts to secure a seat at the negotiating table.
The SNP, however, no longer set the political weather – as it had done for more than a decade. Not only was Sturgeon’s March call for a second referendum airbrushed from history but, emboldened by the election result, Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson grew more confident in challenging the First Minister’s claim to ‘stand up for Scotland’, presenting her 13 Scottish MPs as alternative defenders of Scotland’s interests within the UK.
Sturgeon, meanwhile, kept doing
what she’d always done: selfies, speeches and interviews emphasising her human side, but somehow it lacked the magic of ‘Sturgeon mania’ between 2014-15. ‘She was untouchable when she was untouchable’, reflected one insider, ‘but the election result means folk aren’t as worshipful as they were.’
The First Minister was said to miss the steadying influence of Noel Dolan, a former TV producer who’d been by her side as Deputy First Minister. And while Sturgeon made an effort to widen her inner circle, reaching out to the former MSP Andrew Wilson, there was still a sense she valued her own counsel above anyone else’s.
At an early 2017 strategy meeting, for example, those present said it was less a means of her soliciting advice than binding them into an independence referendum she’d more or less decided on. Even some colleagues seemed to regard her as remote; Paisley MP Mhairi Black, once spoken of as a future leader by Sturgeon, admitted they’d never had a proper conversation.
Once a frequent visitor to Westminster, relations between the First Minister and her MPs ended up feeling ‘semi-detached’. ‘I know her as well as anyone who isn’t a colleague,’ reflected one former adviser, ‘but I feel I don’t know her at all.’ Another SNP insider said he still regarded Sturgeon as by far the best-qualified First Minister but, at the same time, ‘sometimes felt quite awkward when in her presence – that’s a real problem’.
In September, the First Minister set out her ‘Programme for Government’, yet another attempt to regain the initiative.
But its contents were largely aspirational, chiefly a promised study of a universal citizens’ income, beloved of Leftish Greens but, in reality, an expensive fantasy. That and a hint about using Holyrood’s new tax powers were rightly perceived as a bid to nudge the SNP Left, conscious Labour was stealing much of its ‘radical’ clothing. The last months of 2017 brought little good news. The EC did clear the way for minimum alcohol pricing, a health policy Sturgeon viewed as her version of Labour’s smoking ban, while December’s Draft Budget, with its new tax bands and extra penny on the higher and additional rates, at least equipped the Scottish Government with a more convincingly ‘progressive’ narrative. The First Minister was determined to rebut accusations of neglecting the ‘day job’. And, ironically, Alex Salmond’s ill-judged decision to host a show on the Kremlin-backed RT channel actually did his successor (who was generally sanguine about his behaviour) a favour, allowing Sturgeon finally to put her often-embarrassing ‘mentor’ at a distance, making it clear she was very much in control of the party he’d done so much to turn into a formidable election-winning machine.
In other respects, however, Sturgeon and Salmond were as one. The First Minister didn’t hesitate in questioning the methodology behind unhelpful statistics, while her initial resistance to Salmond-style attacks on the media weakened, regularly taking to Twitter to rubbish headlines (untrue or not), once even accusing the Scottish press of ‘enabling’ Tory lies.
YOU know, I’m a politician’, Sturgeon said at the Edinburgh Book Festival, ‘I’m not going to sit here and pretend I’m some kind of paragon of virtue as a politician because that doesn’t exist. I indulge in the same behaviours as other politicians; we’re susceptible to spinning things from time to time but I’ve always tried… to speak from the heart and say things I believed in.’
This was how the First Minister liked to see herself, as consistent and principled. At Holyrood, she even accused opponents of asking ‘political’ questions, almost as if she herself – in many ways a deeply tribal politician – rose above the hypocrisies of party politics.
For a long time, many Scots seemed prepared to buy into that persona, judging Sturgeon more on good intentions than deeds, but after more than three years as First Minister that appeared subject to the law of diminishing returns.
Even pro-independence commentator Robin McAlpine conceded it was hard to identify much ‘progress’ beyond the tired ‘omni-excuse’ of Brexit. Most leaders, he reflected, achieved most in their first three years. Was Sturgeon suffering the fate of John Major vis-à-vis Margaret Thatcher, Brown after Blair? All had significant strengths yet struggled to escape their predecessors’ shadows. Could she escape that political fate? Could she turn things around between now and the 2021 Holyrood election? Sturgeon certainly intended to carry on.
A few weeks ago, she published an ‘updated analysis’ of her European strategy, while Andrew Wilson is due to reveal his ‘Growth Commission’ report, a ‘catalyst’, according to Sturgeon, ‘for relaunching the arguments for independence’. After the events of the last 18 months, she must be dearly hoping that’s true.