SOON after leaving office in 2023, Nicola Sturgeon signed a contract to produce a memoir. It has now been published under the title Frankly. For the past two weeks, she has been interviewed by just about every media outlet. Several extracts appeared in the Times, resulting in it being headline news in the press and on national and local news.  

You might think that this is the level of coverage that should be afforded to someone who was first minister for nine years and who led the government through some significant times in Scottish politics.  

She had to deal with the aftermath of the independence referendum, the introduction of tax-raising powers, the impact of the EU referendum, the Covid crisis and the turnover of five Tory prime ministers.  

During this time, her government was dealing with crises relating to child poverty, health and social care, drug deaths, education, job losses, the environment and the failure to have an industrial strategy.  

The extracts that the Times chose, and the additional coverage resulting from them, has been “silly season on steroids.” Day after day, we were subjected to personal information covering the range of emotional crises that Sturgeon experienced for the past 15 or so years, but hardly any mention of the political issues covering the same period, which had significant impacts on people’s lives.  

What we have heard in great detail is her version of events relating to Alex Salmond. She complains that he left her to produce the huge tome, Scotland’s Future, Your Guide to an Independent Scotland, released before the 2014 referendum, while he was on a trip to China enjoying horse racing.  

She was left at home with the huge task and had a panic attack. She then details her emotional state when Salmond stood down, leaving her as first minister.  

She describes the impact of the sexual harassment case against Salmond had on her, such as she felt sick when reading the complaints. Commenting on his justifiable objections about the way the complaint process was “botched,” she goes on to say that “it was not unreasonable to say that the buck stopped” with Leslie Evans, the head of the Civil Service. Even today, it seems incredible that Evans did not mention to her boss, the first minister, that the previous first minister was being investigated.  

When the outcome of the Scottish government investigation was leaked, she says that it crossed her mind many times that it “might have been Alex himself or someone acting on his behalf.”

She says that she had known him to make these kinds of calculations in the past. If there is damaging information certain to emerge about you and there is nothing you can do to stop it, get it out in a way that gives you the best chance of controlling the narrative. “At a stroke, he was able to cast himself as the victim of underhand dealing.”  

What is missing is that the true victims in this debacle were not politicians but the women who had worked with Salmond. As David Clegg and Kieran Andrews say in their book Break-up: “The fallout from the saga has set the #MeToo movement in Scotland back immeasurably: who now would want to speak out about the misbehaviour of powerful men, particularly in politics, if this is the result?”

When she resigned unexpectedly on March 28 2023, the complaint about the SNP’s misuse of donations had been running for some time, and it was just eight days before the arrest of her husband, Peter Murrell, in connection with that investigation.  

Her description of that time, as covered in the book, once again concentrates on her emotional turmoil and her tears of relief when the charges were not pursued, but nothing to help us understand what the case is actually about.  

In further extracts, she talks about her experience of miscarrying before the 2011 Scottish election. It is a very sad incident that she writes about in detail. She also takes on the issue of her sexuality, which had been the focus of gossip on social media with little or no coverage in the mainstream press.  

These are just some of the personal issues that the media has picked up relating to the book. Assuming that it is Sturgeon who has created the narrative they have followed, perhaps having learned the art from Salmond, then it has successfully distracted them from giving a critical analysis of her time as a leading player in the SNP and particularly as first minister.

She has, for much of her career, been at pains to present herself as a social democrat, but this doesn’t match what she has done when in power. Back in 2018, the Sustainable Growth Commission, established by Sturgeon, outlined how an SNP government would run the economy after independence.  

Woven into its fabric was the belief that global capitalism, with its free markets and neoliberal policies, was the only possible economic structure for a future Scotland.  

Her endorsement of this strategy was probably the last straw for many who still thought there was a “left” way forward to independence under the SNP. Its limited vision, which required cuts to public spending and retaining sterling for the foreseeable future, was not the future they had hoped for.  

The lack of industrial strategy under Sturgeon’s leadership has been a disaster. The concentration on inward investment has resulted in a turnover of overseas companies moving in and then leaving, often resulting in the closure of what had been a viable company and the loss of jobs.  

When there was a real danger of job losses at the turbine jacket manufacturer BiFab in Fife and Lewis, the Scottish government said that rules on state aid prevented it from taking them over. It then awarded contracts for turbine jackets overseas. This is just one example of the lack of determination to use government resources to support Scottish industry.  

Its approach to the awarding of oil and gas and renewable licences has seen the usual suspects of multibillion, multinational companies winning those contracts.  

Her relationship with trade unions, which were ready to give her the benefit of the doubt, couldn’t survive her actions in failing to defend jobs or insist on acceptable terms and conditions when awarding government grants.  

Her stifling of local government, even when much of it was under SNP leadership, continued the centralising of powers to Scottish government control.  

These are just some of the questions I would have wanted the interviewers and the journalists to raise with her as part of the endless coverage. As for the rest, frankly, I don’t give a damn.  

Pauline Bryan is convener of the Red Paper Collective.