A fixed, shallow smile... but her eyes said it all
DESPITE the quaint, drawing-room background, Nicola Sturgeon’s encounter with Andrew Neil was a brutal battle of wills. The BBC bruiser was relentless in pursuit of his quarry and the SNP leader’s thunderous glares betrayed the feelings a shallow smile could barely conceal.
Here, she suppressed an evident irritation; there, she couldn’t control her urge to bite back. There was nuclear disdain in her eyes. She has been First Minister for five years but still hasn’t come to terms with the idea that she should have to answer questions that don’t start from the assumption she is right about everything.
A Scot without a chip on his shoulder, Neil has never sat well with the SNP. He thinks it’s the job of broadcasters to ask difficult questions of Scotland’s First Minister. You can see why he plies his trade in London these days.
His BBC One interrogation of one of the least scrutinised government officials outside of North Korea’s more hardline provinces was building to a crescendo, but first there were testy exchanges on Brexit, Scexit and Sturgeon’s Growth Commission. Sturgeon blustered through questions about what real leverage she would have with a minority Corbyn government and how she could hope to sign up a separate Scotland for the EU without a currency of its own.
Neil quoted Institute for Fiscal Studies findings that her Growth Commission would mean another decade of austerity.
‘I don’t accept that characterisation,’ Sturgeon riposted.
‘It’s the IFS,’ Neil sputtered, as though under the impression facts have any purchase with Scottish Nationalists. Sturgeon, much like Michael Gove, has had enough of experts.
In ‘reality’, the Growth Commission might mean austerity – but reality has a well-known Unionist bias. In Scexitland, where statistics are more careful not to talk down Scotland, the Commission’s proposals meant unicorns for everyone.
Sturgeon claimed its plans would have meant ‘Scotland wouldn’t have suffered the austerity cuts to our budget that we have suffered’ in the last decade.
‘Actually,’ Neil interrupted, Columbolike.
‘I’ve looked into this and the figure would have been £50billion more over ten years.’
The interviewer pressed Sturgeon to show her workings. She managed: ‘Eh... if you apply those figures... Em... I... I have had that figure done by Scottish... Government... well... I... I don’t know... I don’t know what your modelling is.’
At least Scotland’s schoolchildren aren’t the only ones who struggle to string a sentence together.
The coup de grace came when Neil pivoted to her government’s record on health: ‘What proportion of patients are getting treatment within 12 weeks?’ ‘We’re not meeting that target—’ ‘What is it?’ ‘It’s below... it’s 80 per cent or so.’ ‘No,’ Neil corrected her. ‘It’s 72 per cent.’
Here came the most savage, unsparing, merciless question Nicola Sturgeon has ever been asked: ‘Only two of your eight waiting times targets are being hit. You’ve been in for a long while. You haven’t hit the A&E target since 2017, the two-month cancer target you haven’t hit since 2013. Children are dying in a new Glasgow hospital because the water’s contaminated, perhaps by pigeon droppings. A new multi-million pound Edinburgh hospital — should have opened in 2012 — is still unfit to open. You can’t even get the ventilation system to work.
‘You’ve got the worst drug addiction problem in Europe but you cut drug treatment budgets by £15million. You clung onto your last health minister, you’re under pressure now to sack her successor. You’ve called for legislation to protect the NHS from Donald Trump. Maybe the NHS needs legislation to protect it from Nicola Sturgeon?’
Sturgeon’s tone was polite and businesslike. Her eyes recalled that scene from The Exorcist where the priest breaks out the Holy Water.