Nicola sturgeon

Nicola Sturgeon has a target painted on her back. Sadly for her, it’s the size of Ben Nevis. Failing public bodies, collapsing school grades and a census as poorly received as Jerry Sadowitz’s Edinburgh Fringe show means taking aim at the SNP is a popular and easy win. The Tory leadership bandwagon rattles its way into Scotland tonight, for its first and only hustings there. The debate in Perth provides the perfect opportunity for the most dangerous drinking game ever concocted: imbibe every time someone bashes Sturgeon and her barmy army. Paisley-raised Liz Truss, who brands herself as ‘a child of the union’, said she would ‘never let anyone talk down Scotland’s potential’ – but is happy to blast the country’s leader.

Miaow. The claws are out in the Tory leadership race, after Liz Truss took a pop at Nicola Sturgeon. The frontrunner to be the next PM told a Tory hustings last week that the First Minister was an 'attention-seeker' who ought to be 'ignored' - a judgement that won her plaudits among the party faithful but raised eyebrows north of the border. And now the media-savvy Sturgeon has fired her own riposte to Truss, telling Iain Dale at the Edinburgh fringe about Truss's own attention-seeking antics. Sturgeon claimed that when she met Truss at last year's COP26 conference in Glasgow, one of the few things Truss was interested in was how to get featured in the fashion bible Vogue. Sturgeon replied: I said to her they came and asked me.

There is a lot of pearl-clutching over Liz Truss’s dismissive remarks about Nicola Sturgeon. Much of it involves conflating a dig at the leader of the SNP with a grave insult to Scotland. This is symptomatic not only of the fetid culture of grievance that permeates Scottish politics but of the steady merging of the party of government and the state itself. Were Emmanuel Macron to brand Boris Johnson an ‘attention seeker’, these same guardians of the public discourse would scoff at the suggestion it represented a slight against the British people. In fact, they would regard anyone proposing such an interpretation as a hysterical ideologue and perhaps even a jingoist. The difference is that Boris Johnson isn’t regarded as a semi-monarchical figure.

Despite what the SNP and its supporters insist, Nicola Sturgeon did not 'announce' a second referendum on independence today. Far from it. Her statement to the Scottish parliament quietly accepted that a referendum is highly unlikely to take place on 19 October next year. The 2014 referendum – an act of self-determination that inconveniently produced the wrong outcome for the SNP – was an agreed plebiscite. All parties and Scotland's government agreed it should take place and that its outcome would be politically, if not legally, binding. This is still the path Sturgeon would prefer. Holding such a referendum, however, requires a section 30 order by the British government, which accepts the Scottish parliament’s right to legislate on an otherwise reserved matter.

It seems that Scotland isn't the only thing failed by the SNP. Britain's greatest grievance-merchants are (rightly) being hauled over the coals today for their treatment of Patrick Grady's male victim, after Ian Blackford told a room of MPs last Tuesday that the disgraced sex pest had their 'absolute full support.' One of those who expressed support for Grady was fellow nat Amy Callaghan who is now, apparently, 'truly sorry' after telling the meeting that the SNP should be 'rallying together around' Grady. And all it took was a leaked recording and a public outcry — truly, the definition of contrition. Don't worry though: it's not just men that the SNP are failing.

The economy is tanking, the public services are in peril. So what do you do if you're Nicola Sturgeon? Promise another independence referendum! That's right, the queen of the nats is out on tour again, dusting off all the great classics to keep her fanatical fan base happy. The First Minister will today publish the first in a 'series of papers' making the case for Scottish independence, amid much excited SNP chatter about a plebiscite in 2023. And why not? After all, the same trick worked for Sturgeon in 2016, 2017, 2018... Fortunately though, some of Scotland's less pliant media have grown tired of yet more press conferences at which ministers proclaim that independence is imminent and another poll is to be held (just not yet).

Today, Nicola Sturgeon becomes the longest serving First Minister in the history of devolution. Surpassing Alex Salmond’s seven years, six months and five days. It’s a long time to be in charge: a full generation by some definitions. Certainly time enough to make your mark on a country with devolved powers unparalleled in the democratic world. But what difference has Sturgeon made in her time in office: 1. Life expectancy for Scots men and women has seen the sharpest fall in 40 years – accelerating in the time Sturgeon’s been in power.  Scottish men born today can expect to live 77 years, the lowest of any UK country (it’s 79 in England) and a fall of some 18 weeks on the year before.

It's just one week to go until the local elections and up in Scotland, the SNP have sportingly decided to dedicate a day to highlighting the kind of successful administration which voters can expect if their party candidates are voted into office. For no less than three separate incidents happened in the last 24 hours which perfectly demonstrate the nats' commitment to thrifty, frugal and competent government. First up was belated confirmation from Sturgeon's deputy John Swinney that his colleagues blew more than £7 million of taxpayers' money on a flawed Covid vaccine passport app.

The finest QCs in all of Twitterdom have made much out of the Johnson government, firing off law suits at the drop of the hat. But while token victories at London's High Court are trumpeted as earth-shattering defeats for the wicked Tories, the shenanigans of Nicola Sturgeon's government in Scotland get far less publicity in the Fleet Street press. For this week the SNP regime was (again) found guilty of breaching laws regarding freedom of information. For the Scotsman newspaper has won a decisive victory this week, forcing ministers to publish legal advice they received about a second independence referendum after a thirteen-month battle between the paper and the Scottish Government.

Dogs bark, cows moo and the SNP duck their failings. It seems as though every day brings fresh revelations about Nicola Sturgeon's regime in Scotland as more and more questions are asked about her party's record in office. The only novelty is the sheer range of scandals which can outrage, shock and rile: last week it was the terf war and her plans to rig the electorate. Today it's ferries and the news that, once again, proper records were not kept of the Scottish Government's mismanaged takeover of the Ferguson shipyard. For Audit Scotland has now demanded a fresh review about how an initial £97 million deal for two vessels spiralled into a quarter of a billion pound disaster with two new lifeline vessels still out of service after six years.

The blessed Nicola has been out on the campaign trail in recent days, spreading the good news and decrying that wicked Boris Johnson's non-believing band of heretic Tories. The bad king's woes down in London have proved a godsend to Saint Nicola the nationalist, ever eager to lead her people to that land of milk and honey otherwise known as an independent Scotland. Naturally the sinless Sturgeon was among the first to call for Johnson to quit over partygate, preaching how 'basic decency' meant he should go for breaking lockdown rules. 'But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!' For just four days after demanding the heathen Johnson go, it seems the good queen Nic also defied the holy laws of Covid herself.

It is said in Westminster that Boris Johnson likes to surround his 5ft 6in Chancellor with tall ministers to make him feel small. And up at Holyrood, Nicola Sturgeon has clearly taken a leaf from the Prime Minister's book, judging by the ministers with whom she surrounds herself. After suffering a reversal at last year's elections, Sturgeon was forced to take the Scottish Greens into government: a marriage of political convenience but one that no doubt reaffirms Humza Yousaf's faith in his own intellectual prowess. For the Greens are led by a duumvirate of Lorna Slater and Patrick Harvie, a man diminutive both in size and in stature.

After the Derek Mackay scandal, you'd have thought the SNP would want to distance itself from 16 year-olds. Far from it, it seems, for the bairns of tomorrow are central to Nicola Sturgeon's ambitions today. Support for independence is flagging. The public sector services are creaking. Calls for an investigation into the ferries fiasco are growing. So, if you are First Minister, how do you regain the initiative?   The answer, apparently, is to let kids become MSPs too. For this weekend, the SNP unveiled their latest constitutional wheeze: reducing the minimum age of election candidacy from 18 at present to just 16 for Scottish parliament and local council elections.

Few of Nicola Sturgeon's promises have aged worse than her pledge to be ‘the most accessible First Minister ever’. The SNP launched its council elections campaign yesterday but refused to invite any print journalists: an effective press blackout designed to shield the party’s leader from questions on policy. Some newspapers declined to cover the event; others denounced it as a sham. As Conor Matchett of the Scotsman points out, the move is in keeping with the party’s long-term media strategy: a broad distrust of the print press and a belief that independence and SNP support will be won online and on TV and not through legacy media.

Eight years ago, and with the independence referendum one month away, the Clyde’s last commercial shipyard went into administration. The collapse of Ferguson's not only threatened the jobs of 70 shipbuilders: it was an inconvenient symbol of industrial decline right as the SNP was trying to parlay rhetoric about an independent Scotland being ‘one of the world’s wealthiest nations’ into a Yes vote on polling day. The Scottish government intervened and quickly arranged for a billionaire adviser to then First Minister Alex Salmond to buy Ferguson’s.

Cast your minds back to March 2021. Back then, Britain was emerging from lockdown, the Americans were in place in Afghanistan and Thorntons still had shops. Up in Edinburgh meanwhile, the Salmond Inquiry was raging. The timely leak from a parliamentary committee which concluded that Nicola Sturgeon had misled Holyrood prompted a flurry of accusations as to who was responsible. Now though, a year on, an answer might finally be available. For Andy Wightman, then an independent Member of the Scottish Parliament, has used the one year anniversary of the leak from the committee to speak out about who he believes is responsible.

Something is rotten in the state of Scotland. No, not the creaking CalMac ferry fleet but rather the health of free speech in the birthplace of the Enlightenment. The warning signs have been there for years now, what with the Hate Crime Act, the Scottish government's efforts to evade Holyrood scrutiny and the SNP's own intolerance for any kind of internal party dissent. But now a minor episode at a leading university perhaps best illustrates the sorry state of the right to dissent in Nicola Sturgeon's Scotland. Students at the University of St Andrews last week published a short satirical article in their magazine the Saint, making fun of relations between London and Edinburgh.