Category: Scots Independent column

Nicola Sturgeon’s Frankly

Review by Andrew Murray Scott

[Scots Independent, September 2025]

Political memoirs exist to maximise successes and put forward plausible excuses to mitigate the failures. Frankly is no exception and most readers will bring pre-existing ideas about Sturgeon and her legacy to the task. It supplies mandatory behind-the-scenes drama, some insider gossip and ‘controversies’ as well as the narrative of her career. From early political involvement in Ayrshire to election as an MSP and 25 years in the Scottish Parliament; sixteen in Ministerial posts and eight as First Minister. A political career made entirely in Scotland without the taint of Westminster, so it is a pity the book was not offered to a Scottish publisher as a gesture of faith in Scottish publishing. Hyped as ‘revelatory’ it does reveal, with considerable frankness, her increasing sense of imposter syndrome as shy activist mutates into the public persona of Nicola and becomes the face of SNP campaigns. Trapped inside the carapace, she learns to function brilliantly as a national leader but often feels trapped. Details of her miscarriage, previous relationships and later, going through the menopause whilst intensely involved in high-level politics, are accompanied by insightful comments into the attitudes of men towards female leaders.

The long and successful partnership with Alex Salmond – the ‘dream team’ that almost won Independence – is scrutinised. Inevitably, for while Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell is referenced 48 times in the book, there are 270 references to Salmond. After his death, Sturgeon agonised about ‘whether I should even write about the events which shattered our relationship.’ Clearly it was difficult for her. While some claim it is posthumous assassination, I cannot believe that anyone who reads it could come to that conclusion. There are few who do not think Alex was a genius, fewer still who think he was a saint. Like most SI readers, I had engagement with both, and it seems to me that Frankly is a meticulously fair account and has the feel of truth, and the truth often hurts.

 Sturgeon cannot be accused either of skipping over mistakes she made and admits these were many. She did not provide us with Independence of course. Some will never forgive her for that. Poor handling of various scandals, and at the outbreak of the gender ‘wars’ in 2022 she ‘lost the dressing room’ as she puts it, a ‘rabbit in the headlights’ over the Isla Bryson affair when her ‘communication skills deserted me utterly,’ and regrets not pausing GRA legislation to allow mature consideration by all parties. But it would be churlish not to recognise her hard work and her record. Victory in each of the eight elections she faced as leader: three UK General Elections, two Holyrood elections, two nationwide council elections and one European election. Yet her sense of self throughout is insecure. ‘There is no doubt that I was a massive electoral asset’ she proclaims, ahead of the 2016 Holyrood elections, immediately undercutting such immodesty with: ‘I had started to believe… that I really did walk on water.’

There are a lot of tears in the book and a prevailing sense of her own inadequacy, as well as an admission that she underwent counselling following her grilling at the Covid Inquiry. It has not been an easy road for her, or us. This book, like the memoirs of previous SNP leaders contains important insights, essential reading for our future leaders.

Andrew Murray Scott (Scots Independent, June 2025)

If the first casualty of war is truth it is right that we consider the glorious myths of the 80^th anniversary of VE Day. That everyone pulled together ‘for Blighty’ is broadly true but ignores soaring rates of rape, murder, racketeering and disaffection in the black out that were not publicised for reasons of morale. More insidiously, the class-ridden nature of the British war effort and the racism of Churchill and other leaders such that the efforts of commonwealth troops was recognised belatedly, if at all. Films and novels embedded these myths and made dashing heroes of upper and middle class officers who often got the medals their soldiers died for.

Few novels feature the ordinary ‘tommy’ but one of the best is Alexander Baron’s  There’s No Home (1950) prefaced with a quotation from Hamish Henderson’s poem The Highland Division’s Farewell To Sicily. Henderson of course was heavily involved in these campaigns and it is a line from the poem, ‘there’s nae hame’, translated into English, that provides the title.

Set in a two month lull after the fighting in Sicily in summer 1943 as the Allies regroup to launch an invasion on the Italian mainland, the remnants of a British Battalion is quartered in the bombed-out and poverty-stricken backstreets of the town of Catania and gradually begin to form attachments with the local, mainly female, population.

Observed through the eyes of Sergeant Craddock, who forges a relationship with young mother Graziella Drucci, whose soldier husband is missing in Africa, the novel focuses on these attempts, on both sides, to forge a new domesticity and some sort of rapprochement.

Baron’s war trilogy (of which this is the second) were bestsellers, yet his work has faded while the works of contemporaries such as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Olivia Manning remain to the fore.

Perhaps this is because his primary concerns were with the ordinary soldier and civilians rather than with the officer class of such as Guy Crouchback and his clubbable chums. Baron had been in the thick of the fighting as a member of Montgomery’s 8^th Army and in the D-Day landings and started writing as therapy after the war. Being Jewish and a former communist whose parents had been party intellectuals certainly accounts for his inability to gain promotion above the rank of Corporal.

The book homes in on the desperation of the individual circumstances of soldiers missing their families and the plight of their starving hosts whose menfolk are missing or dead. A kind of symbiotic domesticity is created. Some soldiers become surrogate fathers to the fatherless families, others assume the role of the missing men as lovers, while officers such as Captain Rumbold treat the local women in a purely exploitative manner.

A very different war novel that personalises the great myth of ‘The few’ is That Summer by our own Andrew Greig, a novel of extraordinary power, a breathless, unputdownable read.

We should applaud the sacrifice of servicemen and women without succumbing to misty-eyed myths and untruths perpetrated by those who did not want the war experience to change anything after it was over.