I’ve yet to meet anyone who thinks Scottish politics is in a good state, and yet there is one woman who seems to be on a mission to seek out every opportunity to make things worse. I spent time last week wondering why, collectively, we allow Elon Musk to dictate our political priorities to us. I find myself this week wondering why we’re so content to tolerate the pitiful Sturgeon Show.
Sturgeon’s only relevance to Scotland is the harm she did do and the good she didn’t do. It does surprise me that we are not yet at the stage where the Scottish media establishment accepts just how much Sturgeon degraded political debate in Scotland. Look at the time sequence on legal compliance with Freedom of Information to get a rapid check on how what once was sacrosanct in Scottish politics became broken under Sturgeon.
I don’t want to write about her again. I’m sick to the back teeth of how much of my life has been absorbed by someone who talked so much and achieved so very little other than to sow discord and rancour. But she was an elected leader, so we had no option to live with it. Why are we still living with it now that she’s a has been?
Let me now be clear; Nicola Sturgeon’s husband has been charged with embezzlement. The police seem to have seized a wide range of items from Nicola Sturgeon’s house which are alleged to be related to that embezzlement. Sturgeon personally signed off the accounts from the period covered by the allegations. She is on video putting enormous pressure on the governing body responsible for ensuring the probity of those accounts not even to look, to take her at her word that there is nothing to see.
I have been waiting patiently for the wheels of justice to turn but increasingly I find myself with real and serious questions about the Procurator Fiscal Service which seems to stumble around dropping a malicious prosecution scandal here, an inexplicably slow investigation of their old boss there, an interminable perjury inquiry the next place.
The police apparently want to charge Sturgeon. They seem confident that that video is incriminating, and I can see why. What’s the hold up? Likewise, it is now four years since a woman gave evidence in court claiming that Alex Salmond attempted to rape her at a very specific event in a very specific place at a very specific time.
Except a reliable witness testified under oath that she was never at the event, the catering list for the event does not include her name, the CCTV camera inside and outside the building concerned has no footage of her on the night concerned, she is supposed to have been at a dinner on a night when she was in plaster with a broken arm…
How long does a perjury inquiry take? So far twice as long as the police investigation into the man who was charged with the crime which the jury dismissed. I don’t understand why this is happening, or what it would take to see some form of justice undertaken inside a timeline that makes sense to anyone observing.
It really does look like one rule for those in power, another rule for those challenging power
That this is all related to a First Minister who was the boss of the boss of the prosecution service, that this woman is being investigated is a close ally of the First Minister and is being investigated by a body which is ultimately run by a member of her cabinet, her having hand-picked that Cabinet member knowing all this was going on – none of this helps the perception that something stinks.
And let’s not forget the alacrity with which the same Scottish legal establishment jailed Tommy Sheridan for ‘perjury’ in his own defence in a civil trial. There was no pussy-footing around then and Sheridan remains the only person in Scottish legal history jailed for perjury in a civil case. Craig Murray was investigated for ‘contempt of court’ in the same trial, outrageously jailed and then out again and could have been three times over in the time this perjury investigation has been going on. It really does look like one rule for those in power, another rule for those challenging power.
It feels like, week after week, there is no debate in Scottish politics that Sturgeon does not want to pollute further. There are tentative, hopeful signs that the nasty, divisive mess she created in the independence movement deliberately and for her own ends was starting to heal a bit – but over and over again she’s back, fuelling splits by pursuing her smear campaigns.
I don’t remember her telling us all about how often she intervened to chastise Salmond for his behaviour when Salmond was alive. Scotland is a small place with much gossip, but in my time I have never heard any gossip from anyone who ever oversaw her ‘brave interventions’ to protect anyone from Salmond.
To be clear, I have heard plenty about how Salmond could be abrupt and shouty and highly demanding. I have also been told directly that Sturgeon was a manipulative figure whose preferred mode of conduct was to stab people in the back and destroy them if they opposed her. And a number of people have told me John Swinney is a bully.
Yet it is a total of one person running a personal smear campaign on this and it is Sturgeon. Just like she repeatedly inserts herself in Gender ID debate in ways tailor made to deepen the animosity and ill feeling and with not a shred of value other than how she thinks, in her head, it makes her sound good.
Sturgeon did nothing for trans people. She hummed and hawed and consulted and talked and ducked and dived and marched and had her photo taken. What she didn’t do in the course of a decade was pass any legislation or make any significant improvements.
The trans debate in Scotland is settling down a bit. It is encouraging that I have seen a few engagements of late which suggest it is not impossible for opposing sides to talk to each other, until lo! Here’s Nicola again calling people fascists for doubting her and explaining how she was thwarted in her sincere attempts.
For the love of god, could the Scottish media stop fuelling her pitiful neediness
She really does live in her own fantasy world Nicola Sturgeon, and it is falling down. She is rapidly losing influence in the SNP and even Swinney is starting to diss her in fairly visible ways. She can barely buy any public love any more and her coterie of hangers-on is shrinking daily. Few people defend her in the pages of The National. She’s not relevant.
So the more we forget her, the more she has to insert herself in our lives, with any outrageous piece of crap she can come up with – she’s passed her driving test! She’s getting divorced (which I think confirms her defence strategy should she need one)! She baked a lovely cake last week! Anything at all.
It’s pathetically needy. I can’t think of any other former leader other than Donal Trump who has behaved like this. Alex Salmond didn’t give us daily updates on his model airplane collection when he retired (or whatever he did in his spare time). Jack McConnell wasn’t in the papers every ten minutes when he stepped down after losing. Even Tony Blair had the decency to go away and grease up some dictators for money and leave us alone for a while.
Again, I don’t care – if it wasn’t so regularly and repeatedly harmful to the conduct of proper politics in Scotland. But it is, it is harmful.
What I have always wondered about is why she got away with so much for so long. Or rather how – the why is because the Scottish media simpered at her feet like a teenage fan club. In a decade of her career as First Minister I saw one interview of her that I’d have been proud to have carried out and it was Andrew Neil in London.
There is not a single interview I can think of from any Scottish journalist where, at the end of it, I thought ‘yeah, you explored the issues vigorously there and didn’t just take her soundbites at face value’. And still they cannot shift from that mode to the mode that is usually adopted when a senior figure is arrested in an embezzlement investigation.
Sturgeon is on the hook for Branchform, but also the ongoing fallout from the Salmond trial and the many extremely dangerous (to her) bits of information still to tumble out of that. There are about half a dozen inquiries that really ought to be undertaken into things that happened when she was in power too – or are we still buying all those ‘we lost the paperwork’ lines? And if there was proper scrutiny of the way the SNP was run there would be more.
Scottish politics is struggling to escape the gravitational pull of Sturgeon’s mess. No-one in the country or in his party wanted Swinney to be First Minister, but here we are because Sturgeon wouldn’t permit anyone new to come through. There is little talent in the parliamentary SNP because Sturgeon was paranoid and vetoed anyone with the intellect to challenge her.
She turned independence into the forever wars, something she talked about deliberately to polarise Scotland (that was her electoral strategy) but with no end point or delivery. She lowered the tone in parliament with her constant, vituperative comments about opponents. She undermined institutions and created failure after failure that no-one seems to know how to clean up.
For the love of god, could the Scottish media stop fuelling her pitiful neediness. You write columns about how Scotland needs to move forward into a new era, and yet you keep dragging us back by platforming a woman who hasn’t had a positive contribution to make for a very, very long time.
Sturgeon appears to believe that if there is a fortnight and she’s not in the newspapers, she might simply disappear completely, gone in a puff of smoke. It is a theory I would like to see tested.