I know I’m stating the obvious, and I’ll probably be one of countless reviewers making the same point, but it’s impossible to read Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir without remembering the smash hit fictional franchise, Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. For those who don’t know (ie, everyone who wasn’t a tween or teenage girl, or living with one, 2005-2015), Twilight was massively popular for roughly a decade, each new book or film being greeted adoringly by its devoted fans.
The heroine of Twilight, a shy, awkward, bookish girl, moves to a small, rainswept town called Forks to live with her single father. In doing so, she unknowingly takes her first step towards a staggeringly unlikely future nobody could have predicted.
The heroine of Frankly is also a shy, awkward, bookish girl who lives in a small, rainswept town. About to turn seventeen, she approaches a bungalow in Dreghorn, knocks on the door of the SNP candidate for her constituency, and asks if she can help with canvassing.
‘I don’t yet realise it but in this moment the course of my life will be set. Everything that has gone before has been leading me here.’
These are Sturgeon’s words, but they could just as easily be Bella Swan’s, for both shy, insecure teenagers have dates with destiny. Nicola Sturgeon will one day become First Minister of Scotland. Bella Swan will join the ranks of the undead.
Like all well-rounded characters, Bella Swan has flaws. She’s clumsy and accident-prone, traits that only make her more dorkily loveable, and give sexy, brooding vampire Edward Cullen pretexts to alternately scold and rescue her, which he does on repeat through four books and five film adaptations.
Sturgeon talks quite a lot about becoming a well-rounded person in Frankly, usually in the context of regretting that she wasn’t one in her hyper-ambitious youth. She admits that she, too, has flaws: lack of confidence, fear of failure, and a heart that simply cares too much. The epigraph of her memoir is a quotation from Eleanor Roosevelt: ‘Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.’
Just as Bella’s propensity for accidents doesn’t stop her riding motorcycles, jumping off cliffs or choosing to meet evil vampires for a spot of unarmed combat, Sturgeon’s alleged imposter syndrome and constant crises of confidence don’t prevent her admitting to ‘the raw talent I had for politics’, or that ‘I certainly wasn’t lacking in ability’, that ‘far from being the weak link, I was seemingly the star attraction’, ‘it all added to the sense that I had the Midas touch’ or that ‘there is no doubt that I was a massive electoral asset.’
This bombast is likely to shock some of my liberal London friends who’ve frequently told me, especially during the pandemic, how lucky I was to have such an an earnest, down-to-earth leader in charge. They, of course, were subject to the whims of the then prime minister Boris Johnson, who could have been replaced with three ferrets in a sack and the only change would have been a slight increase in decisiveness and gravitas, so, to them, Sturgeon seemed a paragon of sober governance, treating Scotland to almost nightly presidential-style podium appearances in which she delivered admonitions with an appropriately dour countenance.
Her English fans can’t be expected to know about every single clusterfuck over which the supposedly competent Sturgeon presided, and they certainly won’t find out about them from Frankly. The mysteriously vanished government WhatsApp messages from the pandemic, the tanking educational outcomes, the CalMac Ferry disaster, the disappearance of a half a million pounds of her own supporters’ money that was supposedly ringfenced for a new independence referendum: you’ll search in vain for candid accounts of these in Frankly; indeed, most aren’t mentioned at all. Perhaps the most disgraceful omission – and I’ll admit to a personal interest here, because I’m married to a doctor who used to run a methadone clinic, so saw the national scandal up close – is the fact that Scotland continues to lead the whole of Europe in drug deaths.
The truth is that Sturgeon, like Bella Swan, is a monomaniac. Both are consumed by a single, overriding ambition. In Nicola’s case, it’s independence for Scotland. In Bella’s, it’s having loads of hot sex with Edward Cullen without getting accidentally killed. Spoiler alert: only one of these ambitions is realised.
I doubt many No voters are going to be won over by Frankly. This is partly because Sturgeon doesn’t make a single argument for Scottish independence we haven’t heard a thousand times, but mostly because of the quite extraordinary obtuseness she displays in talking about the referendum of 2014.
‘Much has been written since the referendum about how unpleasant and divisive it was. My experience… was the opposite of that characterisation.’
No shit, Nicola. You, surrounded only by adoring nationalists, flying between public meetings in a helicopter bearing a large image of your own face, enjoying police protection and all the excitement of potentially bringing about your life’s ambition, enjoyed the referendum? I’m amazed.
Both Sturgeon and her predecessor, Alex Salmond, made great play back in 2014 about how very different their nationalism was to the nasty kind – you know, the racist, get-the-immigrants-out, thuggish sort you find in other, lesser countries. Scotland, they asserted, breeds a kinder, better type of nationalist. You get all the good stuff – an upsurge in national pride, a flowering of native culture, a people once more embracing self determination – without the slightest echo of jackboots.
Oddly, this message didn’t resonate too well with No voters who were being threatened with violence, told to fuck off out of Scotland, quizzed on the amount of Scottish blood that ran in their veins, accused of treachery and treason and informed that they were on the wrong side of, as one ‘cybernat’ memorably put it, ‘a straightforward battle between good and evil.’
Even while conceding she possibly ‘didn’t make enough effort at the time to appreciate what it was like for those on the other side’, Sturgeon’s final analysis of the referendum is that ‘the contest was, in the main, positive and good-natured.’ This is an excellent example of a recurrent feature of Frankly: Sturgeon acknowledging that she could – maybe, perhaps, just possibly – have done something a teeny bit better, then awarding herself an A-.
In 2014 Sturgeon wasn’t yet First Minister, and in those days I felt some non-partisan admiration for her as a woman successfully navigating the male-dominated power structure at Holyrood. Sturgeon talks a lot in Frankly about the sexist expectations and assumptions made about women in the workplace and by the media, about the sexualised insults thrown women’s way by men, about being physically intimidated while out canvassing and about the disdain for women she’s encountered in men of the hard left. I have personal experience of all of this.
Yet Nicola Sturgeon’s obtuseness runs far deeper than an inability to truly step into a No voter’s shoes. When your belief in your cause is so deeply rooted that there is literally no evidence that could shake it, it has become religious, and opposition will inevitably come to be seen, not as rational disagreement, but as a fundamental moral failing.
Seventeen is the age when you’re supposed to believe in things that seem barking mad to less special, more cynical people – astrology, Jeremy Corbyn, devoting your life to a very sexy vampire. Adults, though – especially adults with the power to remove protections from over half the population – surely we’re allowed to expect them to do the critical thinking and look at the facts?
Notwithstanding all the ruminating on sexism and misogyny Sturgeon does in Frankly, always as it affects her personally, she is unshakeable in her belief that if men put on dresses and call themselves women they can only be doing so with innocent motives. Sturgeon hasn’t been remotely humbled by the Supreme Court ruling that proved her government was forcing a misinterpretation of the UK-wide Equality Act on Scotland, one that robbed women of many single sex spaces and of their very existence as a definable class with rights protected in law. She remains stubbornly wedded to her belief that it is possible to let some men into women’s spaces on the men’s say so, without letting any man who fancies it come inside. She denies there are any risks to a policy of gender self-identification. She can’t imagine any male predator capitalising on such policies, in spite of the fact that it has, demonstrably, happened many times. She is flat out Trumpian in her shameless denial of reality and hard facts.
She asks in Frankly what my intentions were, in posting a picture of myself online wearing a T-shirt bearing the words: Nicola Sturgeon, Destroyer of Women’s Rights. She says this was a turning point that changed everything and made her afraid for her physical safety.
Eleven years ago, when she and I found ourselves on opposite sides of a different public debate, I didn’t hold her accountable for all the threats I received from nationalists, nor for the porn her supporters circulated, with my face pasted onto a naked actress’s body. As the gender wars have raged, I have not accused her of emboldening the kind of ‘activist’ whose threats against me have twice necessitated police action.
What were my intentions in posting the picture? I hoped journalists would use it as a pretext to confront the First Minister with questions she’d so far either refused to answer, or treated with contempt, when non-famous women asked them. I knew for a fact that grassroots feminists had clamoured to meet her – I was friends with some of them, which is how I got the T-shirt. All-female policy groups had attempted to show Sturgeon the data on risks of letting men self-identify into women’s changing rooms, bathrooms, rape crisis centres and domestic abuse shelters, to no avail. She’d dismissed all of them as unworthy of her time and attention.
Sturgeon tells us in Frankly that she wants to eradicate misogyny directed at women in the ‘public sphere’, ie, famous people like her and like me, who’re sent sexualised threats and insults. ‘Sphere’ is an interesting word, isn’t it? So very close to ‘bubble.’ While Sturgeon is focused on making sure no hurty sexist words penetrate hers, she’s entirely dismissive of the harms done in actual physical spaces, where she expected nurse Sandie Peggie to deal with a heavy menstrual flood in front of a cosplaying man, and vulnerable female prisoners to accept being incarcerated with trans-identified male sex offenders. The First Minister, with her police protection, her carefully monitored official residence and her chauffeured car just couldn’t see what these bigots were making a fuss about.
But then Isla Bryson burst into the news. Bryson, a convicted double rapist, had decided he was a woman and would rather be incarcerated with the sex against which he’d already committed the most male of crimes. When asked on television whether bald, blonde wig-wearing Bryson was a man or a woman, the First Minister, whose composure and articulacy under fire had, for years, been her most potent political asset, made herself look – and forgive me for employing a PR term here – a complete fuckwit.
Of course, the blame for her looking like a complete fuckwit lies with others. Nobody had warned her about Bryson, you see. She apparently had no idea that the very thing feminists had warned her was likely to happen, and had already happened – trans-identified man Katie Dolotowski had already sexually assaulted a ten-year-old girl in a public bathroom, and served his time in a women’s prison in Scotland – would happen again. She explains in Frankly that she was worried about the impact it would have on trans people if she denied Bryson was a woman.
Therein lies the problem in the smallest of nutshells. If you’re prepared to accept the foundational falsehood that some men are women, you’ll inevitably find yourself panicking like a pheasant caught in headlights one day, because to admit that even a single man who says he’s a woman isn’t means the whole edifice of gender self-ID collapses.
Does Sturgeon show any humility about this in Frankly? Come now – you know our heroine better than that. Far from apologising or reconsidering, she took to television once more and spoke the words she omits to include in her memoir, but that damned her forever among the women who’d fought hard against the authoritarian, misogynistic climate she’d done so much to foster.
‘There are people who have opposed this bill [the Gender Recognition Act] that cloak themselves in women’s rights to make it acceptable, but just as they’re transphobic you’ll also find that they’re deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well.’
This was Sturgeon’s ‘basket of deplorables’ moment, the quote that will – and should – be forever attached to her political legacy. Those words fell out of her mouth so easily and fluently they must have been either long suppressed or previously rehearsed, and in speaking them, she demonised and stigmatised not only women in her own party who’d believed in her integrity and worked hard to get her elected, but female survivors of sexual trauma, women with disabilities wanting same-sex care, lesbians asserting a right to associate without straight, cross-dressing men, everyone concerned about safety, privacy, fairness and dignity for girls, and regular women fighting not to be erased in law as a definable class with issues and needs specific to those with female anatomy.
And so to the three hundred thousand pound question: is Frankly a good read? Honestly, only if you find Nicola Sturgeon so fascinating the dull details of her political decision-making intrigue you, and are prepared to accept all her special pleading. The biggest impediment to enjoyment is that Sturgeon, like Bella Swan, has a complete void where a sense of humour should be. Bella’s best attempt at a witticism in Twilight is when she says, in answer to a query as to why she isn’t tanned, ‘my mother is half albino’. The only time Sturgeon makes what I think is supposed to be a joke is when she says of a teenage boyfriend, ‘His nickname was Sparky (he wasn’t an aspiring electrician).’
Most of the time, Frankly reads like a PR statement that’s been through sixteen drafts. The best anecdote is on page 120, when Sean Connery teaches Sturgeon an acting trick to lower her voice. But if you’re looking for a more scintillating read, I recommend The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht – especially if you want the real low down on the dystopian nightmare Sturgeon’s gender beliefs have imposed on Scottish women.
Of course, I might be missing the point. Maybe Frankly isn’t supposed to entertain, but to serve as what is sometimes called a CV distinguisher? Its author has expressed a fervent wish to escape the confines of Scotland, and is still young enough that a cushy sinecure with UN Women would be welcome. I hear a penis isn’t a prerequisite for absolutely all the women’s posts they hand out like candy.
Like vampires who attempt to blend in undetectably with regular humans, successful politicians must understand the public mood, if only to mimic or manipulate it. Neither group can afford to slip out of touch with the real-life concerns of normal people. The lifeblood of politics is connection, feigned or sincere. You have to understand, or pretend to, the hopes and fears animating the populace you’re supposed to be serving.
If, like gorgeous, muscular-chested Edward Cullen, you’re a Good Vampire – an ethical hunter determined to do no harm to humans – you won’t sneer at ordinary mortals’ well-founded instinct for danger. You won’t persecute women for being afraid, or for wishing to defend themselves. You’ll be self-aware enough to know that you have powers and protections they don’t.
By this standard, Nicola Sturgeon, unlike the eventually undead Bella Swan, isn’t a Good Vampire at all. She’s caused real, lasting harm by presiding over and encouraging a culture in which women have been silenced, shamed, persecuted and placed in situations that are degrading and unsafe, all for not subscribing to her own luxury beliefs.
So I’d like to suggest a more fitting epigraph for Frankly, one I feel represents its subject’s career far better than the words of Eleanor Roosevelt. Spoken by a solipsistic fictional teenager, but just as appropriate coming from the mouth of an arrogant woman of fifty-five who continues to believe the problem is always the wicked enemies who refuse to view matters her way:
Sometimes I wondered if I was seeing the same things through my eyes that the rest of the world was seeing through theirs. Maybe there was a glitch in my brain.
Stephenie Meyer
Twilight
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