“How are the mighty fallen,” as David lamented over Jonathan. Or perhaps Puccini’s epitaph on Scarpia: “And before him all Rome trembled”. And then, again, Shelley’s reflection on Ozymandias, King of Kings: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!/Nothing beside remains”. Yet none of those panegyrics on fallen power does full justice to Nicola Ferguson Sturgeon’s journey from Great Pooh-bah of All the Jocks to the shrunken, sobbing penitent giving evidence at the Caledonian leg of the Covid Inquiry.
The first, incontestable conclusion to be drawn from Sturgeon’s tearful performance is that all future witnesses must be frisked for onions at the door. The whole squalid saga of the Sturgeon era, now increasingly emerging into the light of day, is a chronicle of hypocrisy, lies, secretiveness, entitlement and ideological obsession. So, no change there from Lenin and the rest of the boys who built authoritarian regimes on the projection of Utopian fantasies, always bolstered by officially sponsored detestation of a chosen enemy (the English, the “Torees”, the entrepreneurs…).
