There have been mutterings in SNP ranks about Nicola Sturgeon’s failure to notice her former husband, Peter Murrell’s, embezzlement of party funds when she was leader. Her stature is not what it was. However, no one expected Ms Sturgon to positively invite hostility by launching an attack on First Minister John Swinney, who was conspicuously loyal to her throughout the Murrell affair.
In the new introduction to her memoir, Frankly, the former SNP first minister delivers a withering assessment of Swinney’s leadership of the recent Holyrood election campaign. It showed a ‘lack of vision or big-picture thinking’, she says. He ‘failed to bring alive the opportunities [independence] offers people in a tangible sense’, whatever that means. She goes on to say that Swinney was lucky that the Scottish Green party did not stand more candidates, or the result might have been worse.
Clearly the SNP leadership has finally started to distance itself from Nicola Sturgeon
‘Nonsense,’ said the SNP Education Secretary, Máiri McAllan, a one-time Sturgeon protégé. It was a splendid achievement, winning the SNP’s fifth consecutive victory. The SNP Health Secretary, Angela Constance, another former Sturgeon bestie, declared that John Swinney is the ‘best First Minister Scotland has ever had’. That was perhaps just a little over the top even for the most sycophantic nationalist.
Clearly the SNP leadership has finally started to distance itself from Nicola Sturgeon. Not that she is wrong about the election campaign. It was pretty dire – especially John Swinney’s promise to cap the price of supermarket food, a policy of which we have heard little since. Under his leadership, the SNP lost 10 per cent of its vote share and six seats. However, Swinney now leads the fifth consecutive SNP administration and that alone will assure his place in history.
It would likely not have happened had Nicola Sturgeon still been leader – and not just because the criminal behaviour of her estranged husband and SNP chief executive would have overshadowed the campaign. As the former SNP special adviser Geoff Aberdein explained on the Holyrood Sources podcast, it was Nicola Sturgeon who burdened the SNP with a raft of policy failures dating from her 2021 coalition with the Scottish Green party. Her criticism of Swinney, Aberdein said, ‘showed no self-awareness, no loyalty and nae class’.
Sturgeon was responsible for the hugely unpopular Gender Recognition Reform Bill; the costly collapse of her promised National Care Service; and the disastrous short reign of her chosen successor, Humza Yousaf. It was Nicola Sturgeon, moreover, who called for a ban on new oil and gas drilling in the North Sea, a policy that has been fiercely criticised by unions and the industry for costing thousands of jobs.
But in her new chapter, Sturgeon shows no contrition for her alliance with the Greens. She delivers a further oblique criticism of John Swinney for departing from her net zero agenda and saying the argument on energy security has changed. It would be a ‘massive electoral blunder’, she says, ‘for the SNP to soften its left-of-centre environmental credentials’. In other words, don’t dare support drilling in the new Rosebank and Jackdaw fields, as SNP MSPs such as Jack Middleton of Aberdeen Central have been demanding.
John Swinney says he hasn’t spoken to Sturgeon about her criticism of his leadership. But it is now open season on Sturgeon for members of his government. Her remarks are also likely to reawaken the controversy over the internal disciplinary inquiry that led ultimately to Salmond being tried and acquitted of rape and sexual assault charges.
Salmond’s many admirers in the party will no doubt relish Nicola Sturgeon’s descent from grace as she continues her post-retirement book tour. Next stop: the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 18 August. Journalists will have notebooks at the ready when she appears in conversation with the former prime minister of Finland, Sanna Marin, on the subject of ‘How to lead a country’. Many in the SNP will be saying quietly: not her way.
Comments