Earlier this year, Nicola Sturgeon’s autobiography entered a political sphere still reeling from its author’s departure from frontline politics in March 2023. Frankly promised to offer welcome, if temporary, relief from the concocted melodrama of a Scottish political class gradually limping towards next May’s election.
However, prospective readers searching for a reflective account of early 21st-century Scotland by one of its most talented politicians will be left disappointed. Bluntly, ‘Frankly’ is anything but and reads like little more than an effort to manage Nicola Sturgeon’s contested legacy. Indeed, the manner in which the author has conducted herself following her memoir’s publication confirms as much.
Nicola Sturgeon’s public appearances have been carefully choreographed to minimise scrutiny of her record. The former First Minister’s ‘tell-all’ interview was granted to ITV rather than a Scottish network. Meanwhile, the entirety of the Scottish press corps was afforded just 14 minutes of Sturgeon’s time on the day of Frankly’s publication. Few major interviews have been conducted since, despite countless appearances on a litany of TV programmes and podcasts south of the border.
This was Frankly’s intended audience. Ultimately, it is a book written not for the country which Sturgeon governed or the movement which she led, but for listeners of The Rest is Politics, and those for whom government can be reduced to theatrics — be that the author’s encounters with Queen Elizabeth II or Sean Connery.
Sturgeon’s autobiography was never likely to amount to more than a series of celebrity anecdotes. To write a different book, one that reckons with the questions Frankly leaves unanswered, would require an assessment of the national movement, the devolved settlement and Scotland’s place in the world. Neither the author, her party, nor the Scottish political-media class is ready for that.
Instead, they revelled in the book’s personal disclosures. Sturgeon’s comments on sexuality stole the news agenda. Countless column inches were devoted to the author’s recollection of Gender Recognition Reform. The former First Minister’s account of her feud with Alex Salmond reopened old wounds, much to the delight of Scotland’s hacks. Nicola Sturgeon thrived in a political environment that ignored the bigger picture. It is little surprise that her memoir should too.
In the years that followed the independence referendum, Sturgeon artfully elevated her personal brand beyond the political sphere. ‘Nicola’ won plaudits not for what she did but for the manner in which she did it. After 2014, Sturgeon herself became the animating core of Scottish politics. As the country’s political sphere — artificially inflated by the upheaval and mass-engagement of the referendum — began to deflate, the former First Minister’s presence delayed the inevitable return of banality to post-devolutionary Scotland.
Dependent as it was on one individual, this dynamic inculcated an anti-politics that, following Sturgeon’s resignation in March 2023, engulfed Scotland. For as long as politics revolved around the former First Minister, Scotland’s paralysis was disguised. With Sturgeon at the wheel, the country continued, at least in part, to look like a ‘state-in-waiting’. Meanwhile, beneath the bonnet, the inherent managerialism of Scotland’s ruling class entered overdrive, emboldened by a leadership that buried politics beneath personality.
Frankly makes this much clear. The author, for example, frequently refers to her various efforts to attract foreign direct investment to Scotland. Sturgeon recalls working “relentlessly” to realise the “massive opportunity” COP26 in Glasgow offered to make Scotland a premier destination for “green investment”. There is, however, no effort to analyse the impact of an economic strategy that, according to Commonweal, has left Scotland as one of Europe’s most foreign-owned countries.
Similarly, when the author recalls meeting her “heroine” Hillary Clinton in 2017, she is completely uncritical. ‘Hillary the Hawk’ — as Clinton was dubbed by Foreign Policy during her 2016 Presidential campaign — would have made an “outstanding President”, writes Sturgeon, having detailed the influence of the anti-war movement on her politics in earlier chapters.
The book, then, like much of Sturgeon’s tenure as First Minister, is fundamentally A-political. In lacking such an orientation, Frankly adopts the received wisdom of the ‘sensible centre’ on whose approval the success of such political memoirs tends to depend. Ultimately, away from the headlines, foreign visits and promises to reignite the independence campaign, this is the same ‘wisdom’ that informed the everyday operation of the Sturgeon government, not least because of its capacity to accommodate the politics of personality.
In adopting a presumption against rocking the boat for much of her time as First Minister, Sturgeon mitigated against the ideological conflicts that may have arisen had she chosen a different approach and, in so doing, created the space for her own brand of personal politics to dominate. This, in turn, squeezed the space that mass politics had occupied during, and in the immediate aftermath of, the independence referendum campaign. Politics retreated from the public realm as opportunities for popular engagement narrowed and people switched off.
In the consciousness of the Scottish population, Sturgeon sat above and apart from the fray of politics. But she did so with the tacit consent of a political class comforted by the knowledge she would not drift far from their ideological consensus. When the former First Minister dared to test the parameters of this arrangement, she was promptly pulled back down to earth, most notably on the question of transgender rights, but on economic terrain, too. Her promise to deliver a National Energy Company was scrapped – and omitted from her book. The Scottish National Investment Bank was hamstrung. Austerity budgets were handed down to Scotland’s councils — whose failure to successfully deliver national policies, Sturgeon instead puts down to “local authority intransigence”. Rather than bother to make a political argument that might explain her assertion, the author swiftly moves on — just as she does throughout the book.
While Frankly recalls very recent history, it is nonetheless a period of Scottish politics which no longer exists. The end of the Sturgeon years marked the decisive return of the mundane. To dominate in the manner she did, Nicola Sturgeon required a passive domestic political climate characterised by established consensus, ideological stagnation and class-neutrality. The results of this unspoken strategy — be it breaking America or opening what she describes as “proto embassies” for Scotland around the world — in turn, disguised this paralysis. With Sturgeon gone, there’s now no hiding it. Scotland is a political backwater, and the quicker Scots accept this post-Sturgeon reality, the better placed we are to resist it.
Last week, the Scottish Government hosted a ‘Seagull Summit’ in Inverness, committing £100,000 of public money to help mitigate the threat posed by large gulls. The gathering marked the climax of Holyrood’s months-long ornithological obsession — a perverse episode which has somehow already absorbed hours of Parliamentary time and forced one government minister to resign in disgrace.
Ultimately, it is difficult to read Frankly and not bemoan the reality that Nicola Sturgeon’s legacy manifests far more in the iron grip of pathetic parochialism than it does in any concerted effort to use her immense political capital to materially transform Scotland for the better.