The Reinvention of Nicola Sturgeon

The entertainer called "Nicola Sturgeon" who deplores partisan, toxic, politics should not be confused with the politician called Nicola Sturgeon.

Five years ago Lorraine Kelly, the television presenter, won a splendid victory against Britain’s tax authorities. Ms Kelly, the pride of Dundee and daytime telly star, disputed HMRC’s claim she should properly be considered an employee of ITV and not, as she and her accountants insisted, a genuine freelancer. At stake was £1.2m in taxes.

She won, with the judge ruling that:

"We did not accept that Ms Kelly simply appeared as herself - we were satisfied that Ms Kelly presents a persona of herself, she presents herself as a brand and that is the brand ITV sought when engaging her.

"All parts of the show are a performance, the act being to perform the role of a friendly, chatty and fun personality.

"Quite simply put, the programmes are entertaining, Ms Kelly is entertaining and the 'DNA' referred to is the personality, performance, the 'Lorraine Kelly' brand that is brought to the programmes."

She added: "We should make clear we do not doubt that Ms Kelly is an entertaining lady but the point is that for the time Ms Kelly is contracted to perform live on air she is public 'Lorraine Kelly'.

"She may not like the guest she interviews, she may not like the food she eats, she may not like the film she viewed but that is where the performance lies."

Which brings me to this moment. For I have recently found myself pondering a surprising question: ‘Is Nicola Sturgeon the Lorraine Kelly of the political world?’ You might think the former first minister of Scotland a politician just like many others, a figure of some accomplishments and plenty of flaws. But it seems you might very well be mistaken. The Nicola Sturgeon elected a member of the Scottish parliament since 1999 should certainly not be confused with the performance artist trading under the name “Nicola Sturgeon”.

This version of the SNP’s unlamented leader is busy constructing her memoirs and laundering her own political history. The new Nicola - still under police investigation as part of the long-running Operation Branchform saga - appears thoroughly unconnected to, and certainly should not be confused with, the actual Nicola Sturgeon who dominated Scottish politics for close to a decade.

As The Guardian reported this week, Sturgeon once again is busy deploring the noxious, polarised, partisan temper of our political times. Constructive political dialogue has become impossible. Good faith disagreement has vanished from the face of this earth.

“People find it impossible to breach the divide, to find common ground” says a politician who never evinced the slightest inclination to credit her opponents’ bona fides far less ever meet them on some patch of common ground.

“Gaslighting” is not a term I favour - not least because it’s the kind of term I suspect Nicola Sturgeon would approve of - but how else is one to appraise this sort of guff? It is as though Boris Johnson has emerged from his crypt to bemoan the casual dishonesty of contemporary political discourse. He might have a point; it would not be clear he’d be the finest fellow to make it.

Sturgeon, though, must play to her audience. That crowd is increasingly found at literary festivals around Britain and, most especially, in London. The New Statesman, bafflingly, is prepared to pay her £1000 a time for earnest “book reports” in place of the reviews it customarily carries; ITV splashed out £25,000 to put Sturgeon alongside George Osborne and Ed Balls on election night though, of course, as matters transpired that might subsequently have been considered cheap at four times the price.

Little of this bodes well for Sturgeon’s memoir though at least some of us now enjoy the spectacle of seeing her funnel her freelance income into a personal company that, conveniently, affords Sturgeon the opportunity to avoid - quite legally - the higher rates of income tax she enthusiastically levied on her wealthier compatriots. They have broad shoulders, you see; hers are in a different category. (I too have thought of arranging my tax affairs so as to limit - via the payments of corporation tax and dividends - the amount of cash I hand over to the Scottish government but I’d previously thought there something not wholly kosher about doing so. Well, I ken noo.)

Anyway, Sturgeon’s latest pious little variation on her theme is that the argument over same-sex marriage would not be half so “civilised” were it happening now and not, as was the case, more than a decade ago. There is, frankly, precisely no evidence for this assertion and plenty of reasons to doubt it.

To begin with, discussions of political and legislative morality, ethics, and conscience remain possible. The Houses of Parliament are considering a bill on assisted dying just now and so, actually, is the Scottish parliament at Holyrood. There are grounds for concern, I think, over the depth of scrutiny being afforded these bills (especially in London) but I see no evidence that a discussion on a genuinely difficult, sensitive, and emotive subject has descended into polarised rancour.

Recalling the Scottish parliament’s same-sex marriage legislation, Sturgeon suggests: “What is striking is how relatively civilised the debate was, notwithstanding some of the opposition. There wasn’t the same rancour or thinly veiled prejudice that had characterised the repeal of section 28 just a few years previous to that, and it didn’t have the toxicity that most debates in current discourse tend to have.”*

Well, no, there wasn’t. But there were reasons for that. First, the extension of full marriage rights to same-sex couples followed the successful introduction of civil partnerships acting as a kind of marriage-lite exercise. Secondly - and in the Scottish context, significantly - the prior passage of a same-sex marriage bill in the House of Commons greatly eased the way for a comparable bill to make its way through Holyrood. A Conservative-led government in London acted before an SNP administration in Edinburgh. To which I would add this: the equal marriage vote was a free one, thereby conceding that members could disagree in good faith and without that disagreement necessarily indicating some kind of moral or ethical inadequacy.

Moreover, I am afraid Sturgeon is at best eliding history. She gives the impression - inadvertently, doubtless - that the same-sex marriage legislation was her project. Although it came into effect when she was first minister, the bill was sponsored by Alex Salmond’s government and passed on his watch too.

It was also passed on a free vote. This had several advantages, not the least being the acknowledgement that people of reasonable mind might reasonably disagree and that no shame or stain should be attached to them on the basis of those differences of view. There was a lesson here, albeit one Sturgeon ignored.

For, of course, the anniversary of the equal marriage bill also allowed Sturgeon to return to a favourite issue: her government’s ill-fated gender recognition reforms. Tellingly, as ever, everyone else is out of step bar our Nicola:

“Could things have been done differently? Inevitably that’s always the case. But we consulted on the GRR legislation for longer than we consulted on anything else, and right up until the point of the legislation passing, I don’t think it was the case that there was massive public opposition.

“But things became so toxic, and opposition became so entrenched and – this is not the case for everybody who opposed that legislation – but there were forces that muscled into that debate who, I think, you know, had a bigger agenda in terms of rights more generally.”

I think if you are going to hint at dark “forces” intruding into this debate then you should really be brave enough to name them. Because, you know, having spent some years now writing about these issues I have yet to encounter said forces.

Hark, too, at how the general proposition she could have handled matters differently gives way to a complete absence of specific choices that could, or even should, have been made in a different fashion.

The lack of introspection is extraordinary, albeit wholly consistent with the “no debate” agenda which Sturgeon wholeheartedly endorsed. Alternative perspectives were, as she put it, simply “not valid”. And although “not everybody” who opposed her bill was a wrong ‘un, plenty were. For in many cases if you looked carefully you would discover that “Just as they're transphobic you'll also find that they're deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well.”

Sturgeon, typically, made no attempt to distinguish between respectable and rancid opposition to her proposals. As such, the general slander was understood. Here, once more, was a first minister incapable of conceding even the possibility of good faith opposition. If that doesn’t poison political debate, what does?

And it is worth recalling that as soon as the general public understood what Sturgeon’s government was actually proposing, opinion moved sharply against the Scottish parliament’s decision to allow people to identify as their chosen sex without question or medical diagnosis.

It was unfortunate, I suppose, that everything Sturgeon’s mostly-female critics predicted would happen duly came to pass. Unfortunate, then, that within days of the bill passing a male rapist identifying as a woman was sent to a woman’s prison. Unfortunate that Sturgeon could not acknowledge the logic of her own legislation. Adam Graham - now known as Isla Bryson - was neither male nor female. According to Sturgeon he was a newly-discovered third sex: “rapist”. That was her “view” because the alternative was to admit that the bill she passed should grant Graham/Bryson the status they desired solely because that was what they wanted. Self-ID is either universal or it’s not; you can’t have a “except in the case of bad people” carve-out.

Meanwhile, the Scottish government continues to argue in court that biological males in possession of a Gender Recognition Certificate can be lesbians. As a result it would - or should - be unlawful to exclude them from membership of, for example, a lesbian association. I invite you to square this with Sturgeon’s suggestion, in parliament, that “The bill does not create a single new right for trans people; all it does is simplify existing processes”.

If this debate has become toxic and impossible it is in large part because one side of it has proven incapable of speaking plainly or acknowledging the true impact of its proposals. One side has preferred to close down discussion and to slander those who disagree with it.

Of course, Nicola Sturgeon is not a culture warrior and she would bridle at any suggestion she is. Culture wars are waged by other, nastier, people. Sturgeon’s views are always unfalsifiable; her opponents’ are irretrievably misguided. Understand that and you grasp her true persona.

Still, her memoirs should be interesting. If nothing else they will shine fresh light on one of this country’s most remarkable, versatile, entertainers.

Bonus: On Section 28, Sturgeon and the SNP supported its repeal but with rather greater equivocation that she would ever now admit. When Brian Souter - who was once one of the SNP’s most important donors - organised a “referendum” on the matter, the nationalists did their best to play both sides of the ball. As Sturgeon put it: "That is why the SNP have urged a policy for many months that we believe can provide people with the necessary reassurance, by providing a statutory underpinning to the guidelines, and resolve this difficult debate. We believe that the value of marriage should be clearly referred to in the guidelines, without denigrating other relationships or children brought up in other kinds of relationship.”