Straight to the point

Over the weekend, Nicola Sturgeon was due at a literary festival in my neck of the woods, as part of what seems to be an ongoing PR operation to restore her reputation after a bruising year. The former Scottish First Minister’s appearance was billed as a conversation with transgender author Juno Dawson, in which she would be reflecting — ahead of a memoir to be published next year — upon “her time in government, as well as her love of literature and the role the arts play in her life”. A friend offered me a ticket, so I took a deep breath and went along. As I walked into the festival tent, I entered a parallel fictional universe in several senses: one where feelgood vibes covered up yawning plot holes, and where nearly everybody seemed to suspend their disbelief.

Given Sturgeon’s much vaunted twin loves — novels and being a “voice for inclusion” — the venue was a perfect match. Not far from Brighton, we were at Charleston Farmhouse; a place where, for much of the 20th century, core members of the Bloomsbury Group — Vanessa Bell, art critic husband Clive Bell, and fellow painter Duncan Grant — lived experimentally with various illustrious literary and philosophical figures orbiting around them. Immersed in endlessly complicated romantic liaisons, this was a queer pangendered polycule before the SNP had even heard of one. (More simply, though not inaccurately, relatives of mine by marriage who farmed the land nearby would refer to the Bloomsburies as “those funny people up the road”.)

In the present day, those now in charge of Charleston try to capitalise on the frisson of inherited sexual dissidence with lots of queer-themed events, including a recent fashion exhibition sponsored by Christian Dior. Indeed, an event poster displayed onstage directly before Sturgeon’s interview showed a naked female standing crotch-deep in a lake, elective mastectomy scars glinting where breasts used to be. But despite management pretensions to be running a modern-day Weimar salon, the reality of the audience at Sturgeon’s talk was somewhat more prosaic: scruffy middle-aged people dressed in violently clashing prints, their LRB tote bags stuffed with books by George Monbiot and Judi Dench. Only a few bright young things were scattered here and there, paying homage to their second favourite politician. Their first favourite, former Green Party leader Caroline Lucas, swept in just before the start and sat at the front.

To the sound of applause, festival director Nathanial Hepburn introduced the main attraction, effectively warning off audience members from airing “their own views on politics” during the question period — a sentiment which drew further appreciative applause from some. Dawson began the softball questioning, and we were soon immersed in a touching fairy tale: about a shy working-class girl from Irvine who had joined the SNP to “try and make a difference”, and then challenged male dominance and discrimination in Scottish politics by rising to the top. Over time she became the great feminist champion who led her people through their darkest hour during Covid. But in the end, weary of acting as a lightning rod for unjust toxicity — including from those angry with her for being a steadfast supporter of marginalised people — she had altruistically stepped away from power, for the good of her country.

There is a mental delusion called Capgras Syndrome, during which a person becomes convinced that someone in their life has been secretly replaced with an identical duplicate. During my hour in the Charleston tent, I started dimly to understand what this must be like. For in many ways the version of Sturgeon in front of me seemed to bear only the vaguest of relations to her historical doppelganger North of the Border.

Not least, the cause of Scottish Independence — to which I was sure I could remember her devoting almost her entire political life — was mentioned briefly only once, with a reassurance that she had an English granny and wanted the two countries to be the “best of friends”. The ongoing police investigation into SNP finances was similarly glossed over fast, albeit partly for legal reasons. When asked what she had been most proud of during her time in office, she said her government had done “a lot to try and shift the dial on child poverty”, referring to increased funded childcare and the Scottish Child Payment, but not to the fact that child poverty figures overall had remained obstinately static on her watch.

Mistily recounting the Covid years — during which her government closed schools for months, and imposed tougher lockdown regulations than in England yet with no real difference in death rates — she seemed to suggest openness and transparency had been key: it had been important “to stand up every day and explain exactly what we were asking people to do, why we were asking people to do it”. Could this be the same woman, I wondered, who was unable to produce any WhatsApp messages from this period at the Covid Inquiry, having deleted them all?

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And having arguably stuffed her party full of young activists hellbent on promotion within the system — including presiding over a jaw-dropping NEC rule change in 2020 that saw younger candidates with newly self-identified disabilities promoted to the top of regional MSP lists — this Anglicised version of Sturgeon advised young people never to see politics “as a route to a job or a career” because “if that is your motivation, then you are doing it for all the wrong reasons”. In her view, “politics, including in my party, now is probably too full of young people who have just gone through the political ranks”.

By the time she got to the bit about how toxic the public discourse about “trans rights” had become, and how trans people had become a public scapegoat, because citizens “struggling” with “a cost of living crisis” and “rising levels of poverty” — “particularly young people who suffered during Covid” — were looking “for somebody to blame”, I started to check what was in my drink. “I just have this belief that people should be allowed to be who they are, feel comfortable, respected, safe and able to live with dignity as who they want to be,” said the premier who had overseen the putting of violent male felons in terrifyingly close quarters with impoverished, vulnerable female prisoners, with no apparent thought to the safety or dignity of the latter.

Was it really she who had closed her ears to any possible problems with introducing self-ID at age 16 upwards, arguing that some opponents would “cloak themselves in women’s rights to make it acceptable, but just as they’re transphobic you’ll also find that they’re deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well”? Who had personally insisted that puberty blockers would still be used for physically healthy children in Scotland’s youth gender identity service even after serious concerns emerged in 2021; and whose Party was defending clinical standards at the service as late as last month? Did she really not understand why all of this might get reasonable people riled? Apparently she did not.

The audience mostly seemed to lap it up; partly, I assume, because they knew practically nothing concrete about the speaker’s nine years in government. Nationalists often complain that the English media ignores Scottish concerns, but in this case it has clearly worked in their former leader’s favour. Still, it was also obvious that this deeply middle-class and well-heeled bunch mostly didn’t want to know about any potentially complicating factors that might temper their adulation, for that would spoil all the fun of the festival: paying £65 per day ticket to feel appalled about the state of the world and the Tories, but rather better about themselves. To this end, they needed a suitable moral heroine to side with, mentally speaking: preferably someone with a charmingly authentic regional accent, getting intermittent jabs in at their favourite hate figures while decrying toxic masculinity, and whose stated values otherwise were vague enough that you could read almost anything positive you liked into them. And it seems that they found one.

During the Q&A, as instructed, political questions were indeed mostly eschewed, in favour of fatuous queries about who Sturgeon might like to do a podcast with (Theresa May, apparently) and which books she might leave on the desk of an incoming Prime Minister (the crime novels of her good pal Val McDermid, in case you were wondering). Towards the end of the session, a sonorously voiced male admirer seemed to encapsulate the general mood of histrionic unreality by imploring the politician: “Will you promise us, whatever the result of the Police Scotland investigation, that you will find a continuing role to speak out?”

By then, I had heard more than enough. As I left, I reflected on the strangeness of what I’d just witnessed: the creation of an utterly fantastical world, bearing practically no relation to the actual one, being wrought in real time via the psychological co-dependency of two highly unlikely parties: on the one hand, a former Scottish Nationalist Party leader; and on the other, the sort of deeply unself-aware, affluent, self-satisfied and soft-minded Southerner who for decades has been a source of both mockery and fury to most Scottish Nationalists in practice. When that memoir eventually does come out, she’ll know exactly where to go to sell it.

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