Over the last week or so we’ve gone into several sections of Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir “Frankly” in some detail: what gender she really thinks Adam “Isla Bryson” Graham is, blaming JK Rowling for the toxic tone of the self-ID debate and explaining how she thinks the law should be changed to let transwomen into women’s spaces in future, her unquenchable jealousy of Alex Salmond and her failure to understand the basic functioning of the Scottish justice system, and finally her laughable denial of her evil but incompetent conspiracy against her predecessor.
(All of which she chose to accompany with a series of photographs that made her look like a sinister Cockney chav crime matriarch in a Guy Ritchie movie. She once dubbed herself Scotland’s “chief mammy”, but now comes across more like Ma Baker.)
But we’ve only just finished reading the whole book, so here’s the actual review.
“Frankly, Mr. Shankly, this position I’ve heldIt pays my way and it corrodes my soul”
To be honest, though, if you’re in a rush those two lines sum the whole thing up. The real story woven through “Frankly” like a missing indyref fund is of a timid, self-doubting wallflower’s desperate quest for validation that leads her down a path of toxic narcissism and corruption, to achievement, adulation and riches that she doesn’t feel she really deserves and ultimately does nothing with because she’s paralysed by fear of losing the newly-gained popularity and acceptance that (as you find out from the early chapters about her childhood and youth) she’s waited her whole life for.
“Fame, Fame, fatal FameIt can play hideous tricks on the brain”
The one real piece of enlightenment that gradually dawns on you as you read it is how Sturgeon shares that insatiable need for external validation with transwomen, an empathy which goes a long way to explaining why she attached herself to their cause so doggedly and, in the end, ruinously.
From the first words to the last Sturgeon really lays it on thick in terms of her impostor syndrome and “self-flagellation”, but while the former is doubtless real to an extent, the second is a con-trick. The book consistently lacks the candour to acknowledge any of her real failings, which is understandable as she basically wrote it as therapy.
She professes to humbly admit some mistakes, but all the examples she chooses are all superficial and without any significant consequences. She expresses regret over blabbing a confidential phone call with Kezia Dugdale during a heated TV debate, over “Frenchgate” and a letter she wrote for a dodgy constituent 15 years ago, and over a prospective investment deal with China, but none of them amounted to anything more than a few bad headlines, and only two of them involved her actually doing anything mildly wrong. As confessions go they’re right up there with Theresa May and her heady dashes through the fields of wheat.
On vastly more serious matters, though, like moving elderly hospital patients known to have COVID into care homes where they caused the deaths of thousands of people by spreading it to the most vulnerable en masse, we get a casual half-sentence at best (“could we have protected older people in care homes better than we did?”) concluding with a “Dunno” shrug, and Sturgeon’s main takeaway from COVID is an outpouring of self-pity about how upsetting it was to have her motives impugned at the inquiry.
It’s perhaps the starkest illustration of a cold, callous solipsism that permeates the whole book, in which seismic political events are assessed solely in terms of how sad they made Nicola Sturgeon feel. That’s somewhat legitimate in an autobiography, of course, but generally readers want a bit of context and reflection too, especially when a lot of people have lost their lives, and there’s precious little of that in “Frankly”.
Of the deleted WhatsApp messages, there isn’t a single word.
And the same applies to just about any other subject you’d actually want to read about in a Nicola Sturgeon autobiography. Like the rest of us, for example, she obviously has to be careful what she says about Operation Branchform, but that doesn’t mean she couldn’t have said ANYTHING.
She gratefully seizes on the excuse anyway, though, so if you’re hoping to get a bit of juicy inside skinny about how £700,000 in “ring-fenced” fundraiser money simply vanished from the party accounts and nobody noticed, and why Sturgeon thought it was appropriate to tell the party’s NEC to shut up and stop asking questions even after it became public knowledge that something was badly amiss – not to do their jobs, in other words – you’re going to be out of luck here.
Similarly, you’ll search in vain for the name of Murray Foote, and why the SNP ever thought it was a smart idea to hire the author of “The Vow” first as its comms chief and then its CEO. You’ll get no insight into the farce of the “11-point plan” or the bizarrely short-lived “Yes taskforce” under Marco Biagi, and no clue whether Sturgeon really thought it was a good idea to keep dangling promises in front of indy supporters that she was never going to keep, and just hope they never noticed.
(There isn’t, in fact, a single acknowledgement from Sturgeon that the grassroots indy movement has ever existed at all. Even in the chapters about the indyref it’s all about the SNP and the SNP alone – Yes Scotland gets the barest cursory nod even though she was on its board, and nobody else so much as a namecheck. You wouldn’t expect her to reference the vast online side of the campaign because then she’d have to mention Wings or the WBB, but even Sturgeon-friendly outfits like National Collective and Business For Scotland get blanked, along with the significant contributions made by people like Radical Independence.)
You won’t even find out what she thought about posing in front of a ferry with painted-on windows and pretending it was about to be launched, or why she was happy to go on a public march for just about any cause other than independence, or how she felt about all the actual sex offenders and other creeps, mostly from the party’s hideous scarecrow youth wing, that were exposed during her reign.
The names of Patrick Grady, Jordan Linden, Cameron Downing, Grant Karte and the rest are all absent here. (As are those of all the women in the SNP – Joanna Cherry, Joan McAlpine and the others – who it might reasonably be reckoned Sturgeon would owe apologies to if she was truly conducting the soul-searching exercise she claims to be. Instead, on her softsoap promo tour she’s sneered at them for thinking about her more than she thinks about them.)
“But still I’d rather be famous
Than righteous or holy
any day, any day, any day”
That might be explained by the other theme that persists all the way through the book, though: Sturgeon’s transparent general aversion to men. With the exception of Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein she barely has a good word for any she meets, regardless of their politics – her animus towards Alex Salmond is of course constant, but Jeremy Corbyn radiates “sneering superiority”, Nigel Farage is “odious”, Jim Murphy “boorish and cocky” and Alex Neil is sacked as health minister for being prone to “madcap and unworkable” ideas, presumably including his plan for a child welfare payment which Sturgeon dismissed out of hand in 2016 and now counts as the greatest triumph of her leadership after belatedly introducing it half a decade later, once she realised to her apparent surprise that poverty had an impact on health.
One of the most striking revelations actually comes after the end of the book proper, in the Acknowledgements, where – as an apparently startled afterthought – she notes that occasionally men (well, one man) can be worthy of her friendship.
(In fairness, earlier in the book she does also say of disgraced former minister Derek Mackay that “I still count him as a friend”, right after saying she didn’t speak to him for “a few years” after he resigned, which is a curious way to demonstrate friendship. Nice to see her getting on so well with Kezia Dugdale after that terrible betrayal, though, and she also speaks warmly of “straight-talking, authentic and down-to-earth” Ruth Davidson, who now does her down-to-earth straight talking in the House Of Lords as Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links.)
Indeed, almost everything in the book is viewed through a gender frame in which all women are intrinsically and axiomatically good and men bad, even on topics that Sturgeon admits have nothing to do with anyone’s sex, such as in this extremely confused passage on the tragic murder of Jo Cox.
Over and over again we’re told, with no basis cited in evidence, that criticisms aimed at Sturgeon wouldn’t have been levelled at a man.
In the same way that the entire book is by its own admission Sturgeon trying to convince herself that she’s not an impostor, she massively over-compensates in her “obsession” with trying to prove her feminist credentials. It’s no wonder she got so exercised about JK Rowling’s “destroyer of woman’s rights” t-shirt.
The great irony is that having spent a decade loading her cabinet with women and putting women in charge of almost every sizeable organisation in Scotland, with catastrophic results across the board, Sturgeon has probably done more than any other individual to perpetuate the (false) idea that maybe it’d be better to just leave everything to blokes, even if it means some of them having to put a dress on.
(The most toe-curling bits of all, and the most passionate she gets in the whole of 400-odd pages that mostly read like a very long and anodyne conference speech, are her gushing girl-boss adoration of Hillary Clinton and the late Queen.)
Possibly the most striking thing about the book, though, is the extent to which Sturgeon treats becoming First Minister as a personal vindication, rather than an opportunity to further the goals for which she was elected.
Because let’s remember, leaders of the SNP are supposed to have one priority above all else: Scottish independence. Political office is meant to be attained in service of that aim, not for its own sake. But time and again in the book, Sturgeon reveals that she regards independence as a sort of side-quest, a bonus extra that might conceivably be grudgingly pursued if there’s time after she’s done all the stuff she really cares about.
“But sometimes I’d feel more fulfilledMaking Christmas cards with the mentally ill”
Most obviously, of course, that was the issue of “trans rights” – we’re told that she started planning the implementation of self-ID at least as early as 2016, despite having no mandate from either the electorate or the SNP for it and despite the manifestly plain conflict with feminism, which even now Sturgeon doggedly claims not to see.
“Frankly” also spends a lot of time outlining Sturgeon’s preoccupation with climate change, a field in which Scotland cannot hope to make the tiniest shred of difference to the global situation, but which she was determined to throw Scottish taxpayers’ money at anyway.
So firmly was she thirled to the ideology of Net Zero that the book even sees her parroting the “oil is about to run out” myth that Unionists have been frantically pushing since the mid-1980s.
Sturgeon describes the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow as “one of the highlights of my years in office” despite the fact that she had no official role at it and achieved little other than getting her photo taken with Joe Biden, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (while plugging the ersatz chemical monstrosity that is modern Irn-Bru) and a nonplussed Greta Thunberg and fangirling at Angela Merkel, which perhaps tells you as much about her as anything else in the book.
Arguably, though, it still came below stopping Brexit.
We needn’t concern ourselves here with retreading how that went, and we’ve contemplated the futility and hypocrisy of the campaign on Wings passim. Scotland had no right to try to deny England and Wales, or the UK as a whole, what they’d voted for democratically. What it did have a right to attempt was to remove itself and uphold its own vote, and if that attempt had failed then so be it.
”I want to leave
You will not miss me”
But Sturgeon wouldn’t even try. At almost every major political juncture in her reign, “Frankly” explains why it wasn’t the right time to focus on independence.
Which shouldn’t be surprising after you’ve read her say that she never expected to secure a second independence referendum as leader.
Wings readers might feel – and we’d be strongly inclined to sympathise with their view – that an SNP leader with no expectation of delivering independence in their entire career as First Minister, and with no willingness to leverage huge political events like Brexit to that end, ought to stand down at once and make way for someone who at least believes they can take a half-decent swing at it.
(Or at a minimum, someone who can make progress on “building sustained majority support”, given an astoundingly fertile set of circumstances for doing so.)
But when advised by her predecessor to grasp the nettle and let the chips fall where they may (if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor), Sturgeon bristled and pouted.
But again, it probably ought not to surprise readers after hearing how easily Sturgeon caved even on much lower stakes.
Measuring by the numbers of pages “Frankly” devotes to each subject and the level of intensity with which Sturgeon talks about them in those pages, it’s possible to confirm what many observers of her time as FM would have suspected anyway, namely that her order of priorities ran something like this:
- Trans rights
- Stopping Brexit
- Net Zero
- Replacing men in positions of power with women
- Staying in office
- Trying to eclipse/destroy Alex Salmond
- Personal/national virtue-signalling
- Competent domestic governance
- Independence, maybe, one day, if something happens
(Perhaps the only surprising thing is that she doesn’t take the chance to expound on the subject of Gaza, although she’d already left office before the October 7th attacks.)
The only two in which she could possibly be adjudged to have achieved any degree of success are (4) (5) and (7), although the book makes a claim for (6).
But with our hands on our hearts, striving every sinew we have to look at the matter with something at least akin to impartiality, we cannot think of a single piece of evidence justifying that last sentence.
(At least, assuming it’s meant to refer to good things. We suppose Alex Salmond never managed to halve the SNP membership, bankrupt the party, drive out all its most able and principled parliamentarians or alienate it from the grassroots indy movement.)
And in the end, “Frankly” is just a series of excuses, of varying validity, for all those failures. At the most generous possible interpretation, it’s a story of someone who tried her best but didn’t have what it took. But we see no need for generosity, because there’s none within its pages for anyone else.
“Frankly, Mr. Shankly, since you askYou are a flatulent pain in the arse”
It reads like someone trying to convince themselves, mostly at other people’s expense, that their life hasn’t, for all its ostensible great achievements, been a failure by any meaningful measure, and taking a last stab at airbrushing their place in the history books into something more palatable.
“Frankly, Mr. Shankly, I’m a sickening wreckI’ve got the 21st Century breathing down my neck”
Because the truth is that Nicola Sturgeon left just about everything and everyone worse off than she found them. Trans people have no more rights than they did before, and are now at the centre of a toxic war and backlash. Women have had to exhaust and impoverish themselves fighting bitterly tooth and nail just to retain the rights they started with (and continue to have to do so). The independence movement is in tatters, as is the triumphant SNP she inherited in gleaming showroom condition. Scotland’s governance is a binfire heading off a cliff and its future is full of her awful children.
She’s done alright for herself out of it, though. And now she’s skipping off, apparently the happiest she’s ever been, a living breathing Hallmark motivational poster about dancing in the rain.
“Oh I didn’t realise that you wrote poetry
I didn’t realise you wrote such bloody awful poetry”
She’s even got the chutzpah to sign off – after a decade of ducking every fight, of marching her troops endlessly up the hill and then back down again, of risking nothing in case she lost face – by accusing other people of being “paralysed and craven”, and threatening that she won’t shut up and leave us alone: exactly the sort of refusal to quietly relinquish the limelight that so enraged her in Alex Salmond, her accusing nemesis even in death, the beating heart under her floorboards.
Even though she’s got plenty of cash in the bank and a fat pension and could just sod off into the aforementioned rain for ever and gie’s peace, it’s clear that Sturgeon still isn’t done with feathering her non-binary love nest, and so we must endure her hunger for attention even as her constituents go without any and she continues trousering a salary while seeing out her last months in front of cosy bookshop audiences on her promotional tour.
“I do not mean to be so rudeStill I must speak frankly, Mr. ShanklyOh give us yer money!”
And that’s that done. “Frankly” is mostly boring, constantly evasive, frequently plain wrong (the list of straight-up factual inaccuracies is lengthy, and don’t even get us started on how rotten the index is) and occasionally despicable.
The most damning thing of all about it, though, is that it’s a diary of insignificance and petty score-settling, like a teenager who accidentally hacked into the MI5 database and then did nothing but look up One Direction’s home addresses and take selfies of herself outside them to wind up her friends. She treats it less as a memoir and more like one of the trappings of fame, an end in itself.
It’s neither informative (because you can’t trust a word it says even when it’s not avoiding a subject altogether) nor entertaining, because her writing style is as guarded and bloodless and brittle as her personality. You end up being grateful for the tiniest flashes of humanity, like when she loses her rag and has an argument with David Cameron (for which she reproaches herself later, after being told to by Liz Lloyd).
We ploughed through it so you don’t have to, folks, and doing some ploughing would have been less gruelling. You should be paying us more.
But a review wouldn’t be a review without a score, so out of five stars we’re giving it zero. Because there are no stars here, only the gutter.
