No jokes, just a steely line in utter contempt
ON such a huge stage draped with so many giant saltires, it would be easy to lose such a small First Minister – even one ramped up on pink suede stilettos and dressed in scarlet. But Nicola Sturgeon, it soon becomes clear, punches well above her height.
Her speech, delivered in Glasgow by a Glaswegian, played to the stereotypes – hard, steely and uncompromising. Everyone knew that Alex Salmond did jokes, all false bonhomie and chortles, but now we know Miss Sturgeon doesn’t. There was one half-joke, right at the start, but that was it.
The conference, she observed, was in Glasgow, ‘so I can get you to come to me’. There were chortles at that – but nervous ones, almost as if the activists hoped their leader was teasing them, but weren’t quite sure.
They were soon on more certain ground once the small-talk was out of the way – bring on the menace and threat.
At times, the First Minister cooed of conciliation, solidarity, and friendship, extending a hand to our cousins in the south, but how the thousands of delegates squealed when they saw the metaphorical fist balled behind her back, ready to strike.
She would ‘frighten the life’ out of the Westminster establishment. Ecstatic cheers! This is what they signed up for!
Then more whoops and hollers when she slammed the ‘democratic outrage’ of the House of Lords, an institution she would abolish as soon as she grabbed even the thinnest slice of Westminster power. ‘So, yes, David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg,’ she intoned, dripping ice into the Glasgow air. ‘If you are worried that a strong SNP is a threat to all that is deeply undemocratic and unfair about the Westminster notion of democracy, then all I can say to you is this – you had better believe we are.’
It was a sentence delivered with a steely glare to the camera, a thin hard smile and a look of pure, fierce determination. With hardly a perfectly highlighted hair out of place, she ramped up the rhetoric.
‘We will demand an alternative to slash-and-burn austerity.’ Applause. ‘We will demand an NHS in public hands.’ Cheers. ‘We will stand firm and unwavering against the obscene status symbol that is a new generation of Trident nuclear weapons,’ she yelled to shouts of ‘Yes!’
This was Miss Sturgeon the feminist, showing she regards Trident as something very male, to be disdained – rather like a middleaged man buying a sports car.
It was much the same with the way she spat out the words ‘David Cameron’, putting as much contempt into her voice as possible.
After decades of Mr Salmond’s bluff, bluster and laughing at his own jokes, this was a First Minister with a hard edge, and a mission statement. And, for the newbies in the hall, she didn’t disappoint.