Venerated, victorious and revamped. What now, Nicola?
Bute House gets cold at this time of year. For all its imposing Adam grandeur, and despite its significance as the official residence of the First Minister of Scotland, the building is a vast antique box that is practically impossible to keep warm. In the early mornings, especially, it is freezing. This is an unacknowledged downside of Nicola Sturgeon’s job and her first test each day — having to step out of bed and endure the chilly winter air of Charlotte Square.
She forces herself to do so, of course. Because this is what Nicola Sturgeon does, has always done — forces herself. The elegant creature of the upper air who seems forever to have been at the forefront of our public life is in fact a relatively recent creation, the result of hard graft, steely determination and an uncommonly large capacity for growth. Of forcing herself.
Version one was quite different. Twenty years ago, when she was a young politician and I a young political hack, Ms Sturgeon had a reputation as one to avoid. She was viewed as unfriendly, overly guarded, humourless and, worst of all for journalists, allergic to gossip. You lunched her at your peril.
This was doubtless due to a mixture of her innate shyness and the climate of the era. The SNP were then relatively few in number, often treated brutally by the media (when they weren’t being ridiculed or ignored) and struggled for wider credibility. At First Minister’s Questions in the early period of the Scottish Parliament, Donald Dewar would kick Alex Salmond around the chamber, which quickly led the latter to scamper back to the safety of Westminster.
To compensate for all of this, the party’s senior people developed a rhinoceros hide and raptorish manner. This was the era in which Sturgeon attracted the ‘nippy sweetie’ nickname. It was when she developed that awful, Salmond-derived headbutt that still occasionally returns when she is delivering a speech or being interviewed. The old photos tell the story, too — the poise, the good hair, the weight loss, the thigh-riding skirts and the heels were all some distance off.
Zoom forward a couple of decades to Nicola, version two. She has reshaped herself, as if rerouting a river. She is standing alone on the stage of the Glasgow Hydro, arms aloft, her name spelled out behind her, Elvis-style, in ten-foot-high letters, being cheered by thousands of adoring supporters. She appears competely at ease, as if this were the most normal situation in the world — it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if she moonwalked into the wings.
She is now fully upgraded, charismatic enough to bewitch an enormous audience, a superstar on social media, a face that has launched a hundred-thousand selfies. And in those selfies she looks better than well; she looks sensational. Power agrees with her. This Nicola would, it seems reasonable to suggest, be unrecognisable to the old one. Of all her many achievements, perhaps the greatest is the remaking of herself.
Dominant, venerated, victorious at Westminster and, in a few months, Holyrood: it’s Sturgeon’s Scotland — we just live in it. And, let’s be honest, there are worse places to be. The First Minister has been a breath of fresh air in many ways — easy to admire, whip-smart, funny and friendly, the pre-eminent woman trailblazer in an era of women trailblazers. While the bitter divisions of the referendum, so unforgivably exploited by Salmond, are still there, she has done nothing to exacerbate them. And even as a Unionist, I see it: Nicola has potential. That remarkable capacity for growth can be tapped further. She has a decade of dominance and opportunities ahead of her, if she decides to use it and take them.
But this will require yet another change, another forcing of things. She’ll have to rethink what it means to be a Nationalist. Up till now, SNP decisions on policy have been made on the basis of whether they will enhance or diminish the case for independence. All other criteria come a distant second. It is their way — the end justifies the means.
But Scotland cannot go on like this, month after month, year after year, trapped in the stultifying geometry of constitutional calculation, playing to a gibbering hardcore minority. The SNP is the establishment now and will be for the foreseeable future. It is supported and trusted by many people who have no interest in Scottish independence, but who are looking for effective governance in the nation’s interests. Our schools and hospitals, our children and our sick, are its responsibility. The parliament is about to be given very serious economic powers. This changes the terms of the relationship between the elected and their electors. There is work to be done. There is a moral duty.
Ms Sturgeon gets this, in theory at least. She has been known to say that she doesn’t want to get to the end of a decade as First Minister ‘and not be able to look at myself in the mirror’. She has said plainly to the rabid faithful that a second referendum lies a considerable distance in the future, even if they seem determined not to hear her. She is frustrated by the continued and embarrassing showboating of her predecessor, who is now more of a burden to the cause than an asset. Some of her views on policy would surprise her supporters on the Left.
For the First Minister, 2016 is the year in which she must begin to deliver, to decide and define what is and isn’t ‘Sturgeonism’. After next May, there can be no more excuses about needing a personal mandate, or arguments that a looming election in any way stays her hand. It is then that we will really see what she is made of.
And this is where it gets tricky for her. Unforgiving hours and an unforgiving media, big, hard choices and consequences to them, a life lived on your toes: leadership asks inhuman things of human beings. You are the last court of appeal, the lonely decider, which is why Harry Truman had a sign on his White House desk saying ‘the buck stops here’. It is why Barack Obama only ever wears grey or blue suits and has his meals organised for him: ‘I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make. You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinise yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.’
This is the lived reality of leading — deciding, and taking the flak that inevitably follows. It requires a maturity of mind even while others behave in infuriatingly juvenile fashion. As Obama has said: ‘Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable. Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can’t be paralysed by the fact that it might not work out.’
For the nation’s sake this is where Ms Sturgeon needs to get to, and she’s not there yet. The charge that is often levelled at her — and fairly — is that she rarely comes across a difficult decision that she doesn’t shimmy around or hoof into the long grass. She has seemed allergic to controversy, to challenging vested interests, to thinking about what works rather than what is comfortable and easy.
For those of us in the business of watching these things the evidence is mounting that this posture is having consequences — that it is storing up trouble for the future. Trade unions are bought off rather than faced down. Pressure groups are appeased at every turn. When it gets sticky, wealth creators are cut loose rather than supported.
Things that need done aren’t getting done: where is the comprehensive digital strategy that will help turn Scotland into a genuine world leader in the industries of the future? Where is the balanced energy policy that will meet our needs and sustain our way of life until renewables fulfil their potential? Where is the fearless innovation and experimentation that will deliver a public sector fit for the 21st century? Every day that Holyrood spends obsessing about abstruse matters of identity and bellyaching about perceived Westminster injustice is a day Scotland falls further behind its potential.
This is Sturgeon’s challenge. There are rumblings from Bute House that she understands this, and that, after May, she will step up to meet it. The area of education is most commonly mentioned. Her best decision as First Minister so far was to announce the return of testing to primary schools. Her thinking is that, with accusations flying around that Scottish education is on the slide, she wants the data that shows whether this is true or false and on which to base further action.
The announcement caused friction with the teaching unions, who loathe the idea of anything that might inconvenience their members. But pleasingly the First Minister’s calculation is that after May, freed from electoral pressures, she will be in a position to go even further and worry less about alienating the unions. She therefore intends to tackle educational failure through reform — not free schools, probably not even the academy model that is proving successful south of the Border, but she is determined to give headteachers more individual power and liberate them from ‘the dead hand of local authorities’. This would be a revolutionary act for a Nationalist first minister, a jolt to our lazy body politic, and would show that times are indeed changing.
But talk is talk. In the decade and a half of its existence, Holyrood has produced enough hot air to panic the climate scientists. We in Scotland have become masters of the false debate, of missing the point, of refusing to take responsibility, of retreating to safe ground and throwing blame at others. Even now we are caught in a pointless post-referendum stand-off, where every issue, no matter how complex, is reduced to the binary simplicity of Yes or No.
Part of the problem has been the lack of a leader who has led in the areas that matter — the ones that affect the daily lives of ordinary Scots. We need someone who wants to get their hands dirty, who signals by their behavior and priorities that we are moving on, and who is willing to use up what political capital they have in pursuit of a better society. On one level, it’s all rather simple.
Optimism being an unquenchable part of human nature, I choose to see opportunity in Nicola Sturgeon. She’s all we have and all we will have for some time yet. And I’d like her, 10 years from now, to be able to look at herself in the mirror and know that she really did give it a shot — that there was more to her decade of power than grimly inching towards independence; that her fellow Scots are happier, safer and better off as a result of her choices; that she took risks and made mistakes for the right reasons. That even though it was hard pounding at times — and because it is what Nicola does, has always done — she forced herself.
This article appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on January 2, 2016
