Nicola sturgeon

The Unionist tactical voting in Scotland makes it tempting to see the country as split down the middle between pro-independence and anti-independence voters. But this is not quite right. There is a good argument that the Scottish electorate is actually split three ways between Unionists, Nationalists and those who aren’t fully decided on the constitutional question. It is this third group who will determine the result of any second referendum. So, the UK government has to have them in mind when thinking about how to handle the inevitable request for a Section 30 order and a second referendum. The first thing to say is that the UK government should ensure Nicola Sturgeon is making the running on this. Headlines such as ‘PM: No new Scottish referendum’ are not helpful.

Tonight the Scottish National party released its latest party political broadcast on Twitter. Featuring a young red-haired woman sitting on a stool, striding around a stage, it flashes various images onto the back of a screen complete with melodramatic background tones. Ignoring the Scottish government's own record of the last 14 years on health, education, social mobility and every other matter of public policy, it asks: 'Who will care? When you see your mother, your father, your brother, your sister, your grandpa and nan, how can we get governments that care about them. The governments that we can trust to work tirelessly for Scotland, day after day after day.' https://twitter.com/theSNP/status/1379484798251626497?

In the run-up to the French vote on the European Constitution in 2005, Jean-Claude Juncker said ‘If it’s a Yes, we will say ‘on we go’, and if it’s a No we will say ‘we continue’’. Nicola Sturgeon and her SNP government are clearly of a similar mind. Not perturbed by the backlash that greeted the party's most notorious rejected policy, the Named Person Scheme, the SNP appears to be attempting its luck again, albeit in a subtly disguised and rebadged form. The Named Person Scheme was originally introduced as part of the Children and Young People Act (2014). It proposed that a ‘named person’ would be appointed for every child in Scotland up to the age of 18.

The war of the Salmondites versus the Sturgeonites is just getting started. Who knows how nasty it will get or what the longer term ramifications will be? Already apparent though is how Salmond's pantomime villain shimmy back into the political arena is forcing Nicola Sturgeon onto ground she would rather avoid during an election campaign. The usual SNP tactic around elections is to downplay separation talk and reach out to risk averse moderate voters, safe in the knowledge the party's most zealous supporters will stay in line. But with Salmond on the scene demanding to know how exactly Sturgeon will achieve independence, that is not an option. Sturgeon will have to make another referendum and her commitment to leaving the UK a central part of her campaign.

I’m not sure anyone won the first leaders debate of the Holyrood election but Nicola Sturgeon definitely lost it. The SNP leader spent more than an hour on the defensive, first from voters, who joined via Zoom to harangue her for prioritising a second independence referendum during a pandemic, and then by the opposition leaders, who tore into her record on health and education. She has been running Scotland, either solo or in tandem with Alex Salmond, for 14 years now and there is the slimmest chance the public is starting to notice she's not very good at it. Sturgeon handled neither the interrogations from the audience nor those from her opponents with anything like her customary self-assurance.

Alex Salmond’s reemergence on the Scottish political scene as leader of the Alba party had a pantomimic quality – some cheers, some boos, and a lively mix of interest and anxiety about where the plot would now go with the principal boy back centre stage. But working out how the appearance of Salmond’s new party affects what happens is a considerable challenge, thanks to Scotland’s infernally complex voting system. To paraphrase Lord Palmerston’s reference to the Schleswig-Holstein question, it may be that only around three people truly understand the D’Hondt voting system employed in Scottish parliamentary elections, though there are probably more, who like the fabled German professor, have gone mad trying to figure it out.

The inquiry into the Alex Salmond affair has concluded that Nicola Sturgeon misled parliament and potentially breached the ministerial code. If you could swear you heard the exact opposite yesterday, that’s because you did. On Monday, the Scottish Government’s independent adviser James Hamilton released the findings of his inquiry into whether Sturgeon breached the code. He considered four potential violations: Sturgeon’s unminuted, belatedly reported meetings and phone calls with Salmond; whether she intervened in the sexual harassment investigation against him; her omission of a meeting with a Salmond representative from a statement to parliament; and her government continuing to oppose Salmond in court in spite of the advice of counsel.

Let me first deal with the general confusion. Most Scots think that the Hamilton Report, published today, deals with the question of whether the First Minister misled the Scottish Parliament when she told MSPs that the first time she knew of the allegations of sexual misconduct against Alex Salmond (of which he was acquitted of in a criminal court) was on 2 April 2018.  On any view this is hardly a ringing endorsement of Nicola Sturgeon's reliability It does no such thing. Instead, the report deals with a possible breach of the Ministerial Code by Nicola Sturgeon on the question of whether she ‘failed to feed back’ the terms of her various meetings with Alex Salmond and others between March and July 2018.