Nicola Sturgeon’s Memoir Mainly Reveals Her Own Emptiness
Frankly, the memoir of Scotland’s former first minister Nicola Sturgeon, presents itself as a brave, plain-speaking account of her career. But this uninspiring book inadvertently reveals the blandness and conformism of Sturgeon’s political outlook.
In her new memoir, Frankly, Nicola Sturgeon’s true ideological instincts move more clearly into view. (Jeff J Mitchell / Getty Images)
In spring 2023, Nicola Sturgeon resigned as first minister of Scotland and leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP). Two and a half years later, she has resurfaced as a writer, with a political memoir titled Frankly.
Unfortunately, Sturgeon isn’t very good at writing. In fact, she is quite bad at it. Her prose is flat, her sentences frozen. Sturgeon describes her upbringing in Ayrshire in the 1970s and ’80s as “loving, and quite traditional. I could not have wished for a better mum and dad.” An early electoral defeat in the 1990s left her “deeply despondent. I spent much of the day wallowing in bed.”
Faced with the global financial crash in 2008, Alex Salmond, Sturgeon’s mentor at the time and head of the Scottish government, was “a man on a mission.” In their meetings, former British prime minister David Cameron exuded an “effortless charm.” Issues “gnaw away” at Sturgeon, ministerial sackings serve a “massive blow.” Silences are “stunned,” successes “roaring,” marches always “stolen.”
Frankly concludes in the most toe-curlingly trite way, as though Sturgeon has lifted feel-good advice from a refrigerator magnet: “I’ve learned now, no matter how tough things are, to make the most of every day, to see the upside in every situation . . . I’ve learned to dance in the rain.”
Frankly Disappointing
The hoped-for accolades here — in keeping with current confessional trends — are “raw,” “brave,” “honest,” and “unvarnished.” Throughout the book, Sturgeon describes herself as “shy,” “introverted,” “scared,” “worried,” and “lacking in confidence” — characteristics, she says, that have marked her since childhood. “The thought that people might doubt my motives devastates me,” she writes at one point.
And yet it all feels jarringly inauthentic. In her preface, Sturgeon states that writing Frankly, in the months following her departure from frontline politics, was a cathartic experience, a form of “therapy in action.” What she doesn’t say is that it was also highly lucrative: Pan Macmillan reportedly paid her £300,000 for the publishing rights, and leadership memoirs are time-limited from the moment the author leaves office.
Frankly does contain some sizable disclosures. We learn, for instance, about the “anguish” of Sturgeon’s miscarriage in 2010 and about the breakdown of her relationship with Salmond from 2014 onward. We learn, too, that Sturgeon’s sexuality, the subject of much rank speculation in Scottish media circles, is not “binary.” (Sturgeon and her husband, Peter Murrell, the ex–chief executive of the SNP, announced plans to divorce in January.) But these insights, painful though they must have been for Sturgeon to reveal, cannot rescue an autobiography as rigid, as thoroughly starched in style, voice, and structure as this.
Frankly’s problems aren’t just tonal. Sturgeon seems bafflingly unaware of how her political legacy looks to other people. In a chapter charting her initial months as first minister — she succeeded Salmond eight weeks after the SNP’s failed referendum on independence in September 2014 — she complains that “vested interests” were starting to feel “squeezed out” of her new administration.
This perception, she says, reflected her earnest desire not to sideline Scottish business but to “amplify the voices of those traditionally ignored in the corridors of power” — carers, nurses, young people, trade unionists, and the like.
Yet the suggestion that Sturgeon ran an open government, laserlike in its focus on the needs of Scottish workers, is absurd. Her tenure was saturated in the influence of the private sector. In 2016, she invited Andrew Wilson, a Blairite lobbyist from the Edinburgh PR firm Charlotte Street Partners, to revamp her economic platform. In 2018, she appointed Benny Higgins, a former financial CEO, to run Scotland’s newly established National Investment Bank.
Such appointments were typical. As first minister, Sturgeon cast herself as a progressive; a straight-talking social democrat determined to cut class inequality and confront the climate crisis. In Frankly, her true ideological instincts — liberal, orthodox, and blandly institutional — move more clearly into view.
Heroes and Villains
Sturgeon calls Hillary Clinton her “heroine,” a feminist “trailblazer” whose “fortitude, dignity, and resilience . . . inspires and energises me.” She describes Britain’s late monarch Elizabeth II as an “incredible . . . extraordinary woman,” brimming with “aura.” She remains a “huge admirer” of Angela Merkel. Yet she “never warmed” to Jeremy Corbyn, whom, she claims, in their interactions during the Brexit referendum and on the 2017 campaign trail, exhibited a “sneering superiority” toward women common among “men of the far left.”
Sturgeon’s thoughts on foreign affairs, muted when she was in office, are just as formulaic. She singles China out as a “threat to global stability” and denounces Vladimir Putin’s “aggression and war crimes” against Ukraine. She doesn’t like Donald Trump, but she never criticizes the United States. She supports NATO and the European Union. Meanwhile, the words “Gaza,” “Israel,” and “Palestine” do not appear once in the pages of this book, the bulk of which was written after October 7, 2023.
Amid the omissions and the excuses, the slack prose and the stolen phrases, there are moments of pathos. Sturgeon’s chapter on Salmond is sad and brutal. Sturgeon presents her former boss as a bully and a drunk, blessed with certain strategic gifts but unable to cope, after the 2014 referendum defeat, with his retirement and her ascent. Their relationship “started to deteriorate the moment I became leader,” she writes. Salmond still expected to “call the shots” and grew hostile when Sturgeon refused, as first minister, to heed his advice.
Salmond’s decision, in late 2017, to launch a chat show on Russia Today, the Kremlin-backed news channel, was a tipping point for the SNP’s Europhile leadership. “We had no contact at all until April the following year,” Sturgeon says. “What came then was devastating.”
Allegations of sexual assault first surfaced against Salmond in 2018. In 2019, he was charged with multiple sexual offences. In 2020, he was acquitted on all counts in a Scottish court.
Right up until his death last October, from a heart attack at the age of sixty-nine, Salmond argued that he was the victim of a political conspiracy, spun from the deepest recesses of Sturgeon’s government. Sturgeon dismisses these claims as nonsense, distraction tactics from a desperate and jealous man who had conceded, in public, that he had treated women who worked for him “inappropriately.”
Salmond and Sturgeon, the two most dominant Scottish politicians of their day, met for the last time in 2018, then never spoke again, signaling the end of a fourteen-year political partnership. Salmond set up Alba, a breakaway party, in 2021, and spent his remaining months railing against the SNP’s putative embrace of “identity politics.” Sturgeon is no less contemptuous in her attitude. “He died without reckoning with himself,” she writes.
Hollow Ending
Still, Frankly is a weird and disjointed text, part self-help journal, part technocrat’s diary. The strangest feature of the book is how little Sturgeon has to say about the country she governed for the best part of two decades. She grew up in Ayrshire, built an electoral base in Glasgow, and ran her devolved administration from Edinburgh for eight and a half years, having been Salmond’s deputy for seven.
Beyond that vanishingly slight strip of the Central Belt, Scotland doesn’t exist in her imagination. Culturally, historically, and psychically, it is an empty space, a vacant landscape in which nothing of any significance stirs.
On the current, stalled state of the Scottish independence campaign, Sturgeon offers no observations. She admits that it was a mistake trying to wrench another referendum out of the UK government straight after Brexit. And she acknowledges that her plan to frame future parliamentary elections as de facto plebiscites was a dud.
Otherwise, Sturgeon seems oblivious to the scale of the mess she left her party in. Her immediate successor as first minister, Humza Yousaf, lasted just fourteen months on the job and the present one, John Swinney, faces a bleak battle for reelection next May. “I love the SNP and my loyalty to it will never waver,” Sturgeon writes. “But I am enjoying not having to view every issue through the prism of party politics.”
The final section of Frankly focuses on Operation Branchform, the recently concluded police investigation into the SNP’s internal finances. In March, Sturgeon was discharged from the investigation, but Murrell is currently awaiting trial for embezzlement.
Sturgeon blames Branchform for accelerating the end of their marriage and describes the process as one of the “darkest” periods of her life, during which she came “perilously close” to a breakdown. She survived it, however, and is now thriving: “I am a much stronger, happier, and more contented woman today than I was on that fateful morning in April 2023,” when the police first took her in for questioning.
Is she though? Like most things associated with Nicola Sturgeon, her happy ending rings dull and hollow.