The fall of the house of Sturgeon

This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers. 

In 2000, Nicola Sturgeon MSP came to see us and she looked especially shifty.

That year she was campaign manager for John Swinney when he launched his bid to become leader of the Scottish National Party. Alex Salmond had resigned as SNP leader, having been defeated by Labour’s Donald Dewar in the first Holyrood elections in 1999. Swinney was the SNP party establishment choice to succeed and there was Scottish press interest, if not public interest, in whether and how he would begin his campaign to take over from Salmond.

The Scotsman political team I then ran in Edinburgh, in an office high on the romantic Royal Mile along with the rest of the press corps, near the then temporary home of the Scottish parliament in the building housing the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, had tried the night before to establish whether or not Swinney was going to announce the next day. Phone calls from my team were not answered. This is bad form, even in  the notoriously untrustworthy fields of politics and political journalism. No-one could get hold of Sturgeon or Team Swinney. The information, the details of the announcement that John “exciting” Swinney would declare the next day, went elsewhere rather than being shared with all papers. It had been given to the political team at the Herald, then dominated by Nationalist sympathising hacks, I assume because they were the hacks Team Swinney needed to keep on side with a Nationalist leadership contest underway.

My point is not that this was particularly bad behaviour. Politicians behave ruthlessly and give a head start on stories to other journalists, as is their right. Handouts are public relations, not journalism. Leading journalists, replete with our own flaws, also behave badly or impolitely in other ways. Such is life.

My point is that in my exchange with her that day I found Sturgeon so odd and cold that the memory has stuck with me and not been contradicted by her behaviour since. This, I remember thinking, is a complete control freak with no emotional dexterity.

A somewhat embarrassed-looking Sturgeon, with her colleagues, knocked on our  office door that day in 2000. They wanted to talk to us – me, David Scott and Alison Hardie from memory – about the themes of John’s campaign, which had been announced that morning without us being warned about it in time for the paper going to print. This was pre-Twitter. News moved back then at a more stately pace. We had been stitched up overnight. Fine.

What sticks in the memory is the impression of how stiff and charmless Sturgeon was. Politicians of all parties make these calculations and smile – “it suited me to stitch you up, it’s a rough old world, can we be realistic and have a laugh or a drink later?” – but not Sturgeon. 

She sat there in that Royal Mile office, thin lipped, cold but highly alert, inflexible, intensely watchful, and parried our questions. A more relaxed person would have shrugged and with a smile acknowledged what had happened, but that would have been an admission of a plain truth that we could respect. Instead she gave us nothing.

Sturgeon, I thought then and watching her many times since, is a person who must always be in control. She has built around her a machine, with her husband Peter Murrell running the party, and a coterie of advisors devoted to the cult of Sturgeon. Now, and anyone who dislikes the concentration of excessive power should enjoy it, they are on the run and in a panic. 

Their boss is someone who from the start could not admit the slightest weakness for fear the whole ridiculous edifice collapses, all the inconsistencies of her gut nationalism, the obsession with breaking apart the United Kingdom, her lack of interest in serious policy questions on economics, or education and health policy, or defence and security. Anything that introduces doubt about that rigid faith, any scepticism or even the tiniest challenge, must be shut down.

Well, she has been found out now.

Sturgeon’s arrogance, her hatred of challenge, her inflexibility and lack of intellectual curiosity, led her step by step to the transgender reform disaster that has now undone her rule of Scotland. This week, Scotland’s First Minister struggled in the Scottish parliament to say whether or not a rapist who had demanded to be moved to a female prison in Scotland was a woman (clearly not) or a man at the time of the offences. This was precisely the kind of problem, involving vulnerable women prisoners, campaigners defending women’s spaces warned about. Sturgeon would not listen to these warnings during the passage of the Scottish legislation, since blocked (rightly) by Rishi Sunak on the basis it conflicts with UK equality law.

That Sturgeon was a player in the SNP leadership contest of 2000, and a significant, rising figure starting in 1997, is a reminder she has had an unusual twenty six year career near or at the top of the Nationalist movement. It is a ridiculously long time. In 1997 Rishi Sunak was doing his A-levels.

In Sturgeon’s decline – there will not be another referendum soon, the Union is relatively safe – we see again in operation one of the most cheering features of the democratic system. Even though leaders can seem for ages impregnable, unbeatable, almost magical for year after year, quite suddenly the spell is broken. They are revealed to be fallible. And they fall.

This is not America

Regular readers of this newsletter, which is approaching its seventh anniversary, will know how much I like America, for its people, political history, support of freedom and Western civilisation, economic power, cocktails, several forms of music, and the films of Woody Allen. I hope then that the following concerns will be considered by American friends and subscribers in that supportive spirit. I am pro-American.

The borderless internet is sucking Britain into its US culture wars to such an extent that many Britons, particularly younger Britons from the digitally native generations, have trouble realising America is a different country from Britain, even if we share a language.

The colonisation process has gone into reverse: American obsessions, outrages and mad rows, produced by America’s particular race or social justice concerns, spread on social media in Britain as though they are ours, part of our cultural ecosystem. Consumers in other European countries are insulated from this to a degree by having their own languages.

James Marriott made this point in a recent column for The Times. In the modern era, the British tended to regard it as an advantage that we’ve had English as our language. We invented it, the Americans adopted English and we for a long time could be smug about speaking the language of the world’s dominant power.

Not any more. Not in the age of the internet.

Until the 1860s it took days for information to cross between New York and London. In the middle of that decade the distance shortened to minutes or seconds, when the first undersea cable made the instant communication of messages by telegraph possible. Ever since, it’s got faster and faster. In the 1980s there was a fuss when the video tapes of the episode of Dallas revealing who shot J.R. (it was Joan Collins, no?) were flown into Britain. Now a report, a tweet, or a meme is here in seconds, and because it is in English, and the protagonists wear the same fashions Britons wear, the impression is created it is somehow always about us, when usually it is not.

Last Saturday morning, I glanced at the news headlines on the BBC’s news app. All three top stories were about the murder of Tyre Nichols, a 29 year-old motorist killed in Memphis by local police.

Although this was an undeniably tragic story, it involved the death of one person and there is no way it was globally significant enough to be considered as the main story, requiring three items, at the top of the national state broadcasters’ app in Britain at breakfast time. Yet there it was, an American news story about a killing given a prominence that would never be accorded to a similar story from France, Italy, Germany, Nigeria or Japan.

What I’m (re)reading

Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis. Jim is a struggling academic in post-War Britain, trying and failing to navigate the class system. Fifties Britain as presented by Amis is shabby and full of comical deceit. Fans of the 1950s who were there and enjoyed the decade say it gets a bad reputation thanks in part to smart-arse scholarship boys such as Amis. The 1950s was a time of exceptional social mobility and optimism, to say nothing of the music and travel opening up.

Another of the other great chroniclers of that period was the novelist Simon Raven. In Raven’s 1950s almost everyone is at it, whether “it” is the pursuit of sex, money, or advancement. The country had, again, all but bankrupted itself attempting to prevent a continental power taking over Europe. Amis and Raven both described a down at heel nation, populated by a grasping citizenry obsessed with the pursuit of pleasure as a diversion from decline. Thank goodness things have changed so much in Britain since then…

What I’m watching

Today, the Calcutta Cup at Twickenham. As usual, I approach the stadium and take my seat as a Scotland fan in a spirit of trepidation bordering on existential dread, although I am of course very grateful to the dear friend, an England fan, who is taking me as his guest.

Scotland’s record at Twickenham is suboptimal, to put it mildly. Between 1983 and 2021 we didn’t win once at Twickenham. The situation has improved a little in recent years. After a 61-21 thrashing in 2017 (I was there, appalled) we drew at Twickenham in 2019. Apologies to those England debenture-holders for my celebratory behaviour that day. Scotland came back in the second half from 31-7 down at half-time to secure a 38-38 draw. England won only one of the last five encounters.

This year? The England team has a new head coach, Steve Borthwick, and there seems to be an expectation the English will take a few months to recover their confidence. I suspect Borthwick’s new leadership will infuse England’s players with fresh energy and belief from the start. English friends, we Scots are overdue a thrashing.

On TV, I started watching Putin vs the West, the new eight part BBC series, but half way through the first episode I lost the will to go on because after a while there’s only so much one can take of the inherently weird Putin, high on crackpot theories of history, puffed up by his own importance.

Luckily, we then stumbled upon another eight part series, albeit with a somewhat different theme and an all together cheerier take on European civilisation. In Amanda & Alan’s Italian Job the hosts renovate an apartment in a sleepy hill-top village in Sicily. For those unfamiliar with work of Alan and Amanda, he is a popular comedian Alan (Chatty) Carr and Amanda Holden is an actress and television personality, a judge on Britain’s Got Talent, a position that makes her properly famous, much more famous than most of the cabinet.

A few weeks ago I noted that the drama White Lotus, series two set in Sicily, had concluded with a terrifyingly dark episode in which the fun and glamour disappeared, and it was all duplicity and death. There is, I’m happy to report, none of that with Alan and Amanda in Sicily. They use power tools to take down partition walls, visit antique markets, go windsurfing, sip cocktails, drink wine, take in the scenery, and talk about life. This is nice Sicily and it’s cheering. Have a Campari – have a good weekend.