INTERVIEW: NICOLA STURGEON

The road that takes me to Nicola Sturgeon seems to pass a grim judgement on her government. Away to my left, Grangemouth smokes silently, a stuttering engine of Scottish industry where unions and management are in an ongoing knife-fight and where Jim Ratcliffe, its owner, is locked in a stand-off with ministers over the introduction of fracking. The broad Firth of Forth at Kincardine looms into view and with it Longannet Power Station, dead and dark, having closed its doors for good the previous day. The estuary itself, calm in the windless morning sunshine, was earmarked for a project to gasify the coal reserves trapped beneath it before the First Minister kiboshed the idea under pressure from green activists. Decisions avoided, challenges flunked and opportunities lost, some might say.

But the sun shines on, and, in particular, it shines on Nicola Sturgeon. I pass a sign for Kirkcaldy, reminding me that even the land of the great Brown bear is now SNP country. In fact, between leaving my home in Stirling and arriving in Dunfermline for our interview, I touch only Nationalist turf, at least in Westminster terms. After May 5, I don’t doubt the same will be true for Holyrood. Welcome to Nicoland.

At the Andrew Carnegie Birthplace Museum, a 50-strong crowd has gathered for this early election campaign event. Everyone, regardless of age, is jangling with anticipation. When the First Minister appears there are excited whoops and the children rush to her. She drops to her haunches — an impressive feat in those heels — for kid-height hugs and selfies. It is Good Friday, so there is an Easter egg hunt. A cynic would say it’s all a bit North Korean, the SNP propaganda machine at work. Sure, but it’s also quite sweet.

This is the Sturgeon effect. These days, she projects the intangible, crackling otherness of power and its attendant glamour, only enhanced by the fact she leads a movement founded on constitutional banditry and, of course, that she is a woman on top. But she retains the common touch. She is a sort of Che in stilettos with a democratic mandate — not a bad image.

I’ll be honest: I wish I disliked her. When you’re in a battle to keep your country together, a bit of personal animosity helps stoke the fire. But instead I find myself wishing her well (up to a point). Maybe it’s because she’s going to be in power for the next decade and so there’s little to be done but hope for the best. Maybe it’s the contrast with the arrogant, bullying goat who preceded her. Whatever, my judgement is that, as politicians go, she is decent, reasonable and principled. And I want to understand her a bit better.

As she takes a sip of coffee in a room in the eaves of the museum dedicated to Scotland’s most famous philanthropist, I throw her an appositely generous opening question: can you explain to me why I like you? She looks at me as if I’m mad. ‘Um, because I’m a nice person? I don’t know… I hope it’s because, whether you agree with my politics or not, you get the sense that I’m sincere in what I believe in and what I’m trying to do and that while I’ve been a politician for all of my adult life, I’m not just a politician. There’s a human being there that’s not that different to the kind of people you grew up with.’

There is truth in this. For those outside the Westminster/South East bubble, watching the Old Etonian Cameron go head to head with the privileged Islington Leftie Corbyn can be like looking through a spaceship window at an alien planet. For the many flaws in Scottish politics, I’d say it’s healthy that Nicola, Ruth and Kezia are indeed the kind of people most of us grew up with.

For her own part, Sturgeon has done an awful lot of growing up. This sophisticated, relaxed, uber-confident mistress of the nation was not so very long ago a dowdy, angry Nat activist to whom you’d give a wide berth. She admits that in her early years in politics she was ‘quite po-faced and serious. Too serious.’ I’m intrigued by the extraordinary transformation and by what seems to be an endless capacity for growth.

‘It’s… I mean, I was always a really shy child. Shy is maybe not the right word… I was quite an introverted child. At my 5th birthday I hid under the table reading a book while all the other kids played ring-a-roses. I wasn’t particularly outgoing. And I was like that through my teenage years, but then — I’m always slightly worried this sounds a wee bit overly grand — there was always just a sense I had something inside me.’

Sturgeon set her sights on becoming a lawyer, a big ambition for a state-school girl living in an Ayrshire council house in the 1980s. Where did the drive come from? ‘I don’t know. I look at my parents and they’re both in their own way very intelligent and always had really high ambitions for me, but they didn’t ever push me — it was never “you must do this”. But [the drive] was there from as far back as I can remember. It was always there.’

Given her working-class roots, that she was politicised during the Thatcher years, and that she has always espoused a fairly standard left-of-centre worldview, I’ve never really understood why, like most of her generation and demographic, she didn’t end up in the Labour Party. ‘I should have joined the Labour Party. Everything about me, the community I grew up in, the school I went to, everything said I should join the Labour Party. In fact, my English teacher at school was a Labour councillor and he got the sense that I was interested in politics and just assumed I was going to join the Labour Party. He brought me in the form I had to sign and I was like, “fuck you, I’m going to join the SNP.”’

You’re something of a contrarian, then. ‘Yeah. Probably nobody in my school would have described me as that because I was also quite studious and obedient and did the right thing, but that was part of that internal thing: driven and just a little bit rebellious. Back then, Thatcher was prime minister and I had that very early sense of “nobody I know votes Tory” and yet we’ve got a Tory government and all these Labour MPs and they can’t do anything about what’s happening in my community.

“I should have joined the Labour Party. Instead, I was like, ‘fuck you, I’m going to join the SNP’”

‘The overwhelming memory — well, it’s not a memory, it’s a memory of a feeling — was the fear of your dad being made redundant. If your dad lost his job that was it, he would probably never work again. And the sense at school that if you weren’t one of the few — and it was one of the few back then — that was going to go to university then you might not get a job, you were stuffed, and that just seemed to me not right. So that’s really what made me choose the SNP.’

By her early 20s, Sturgeon had decided she wanted to give her life to politics rather than to the law. One can imagine her parents, seeing their daughter turn her back on one of the great aspirational professions, with its guarantees of security and status and a higher standard of living — of escape — weren’t best pleased.

She laughs. ‘I think that for all my mum and dad are hugely, hugely proud of me, there’s part of my mum — and she would deny it if she was sitting here right now — who thinks “you went through all that to study law and become a lawyer and you’ve wasted it!” That’s never far from the surface — I think she still kind of feels it.

‘Back then, joining the SNP was no career move at all. I tell the story of going to my first-ever party meeting and there was a jubilant air because a monthly poll showed we’d gone into double figures. We were at 12 per cent. Everyone was like, “this is it, we’re on the march!” And there was no Scottish Parliament, you know? But there was something in me. I wanted to be in politics, I wanted to do this, though I had joined a party that back then made it very unlikely that would ever happen.’

The First Minister is a bookworm, with a particular taste for crime novels. She is, for obvious reasons, not getting much reading done at the moment, but she recently consumed the second volume of Charles Moore’s authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher. I’d wanted to talk to her about the art of governing and how she approaches it. I mention Barack Obama’s strategy of removing all unnecessary choices from his life, such as the colour of suit he wears (‘I’m a woman, I don’t have that luxury,’ she interrupts), ensuring he stays sharp for the decisions that really matter. I take it the Thatcher book has some insights in this area? How deeply does Sturgeon think about these things?

‘I read the Thatcher book because I’m interested in political history, recent and further back, but it was also about trying to understand the thought processes, the art and the science of it all. I guess I’m trying more than anything else to learn from my own experience of doing it, the mistakes and the things that I get right. Nothing ever does really prepare you. You can be close to it for a long time but when you’re in the job yourself, sitting at the famous desk, you have to find your own way of making decisions and living with the consequences of those decisions. I don’t know whether anyone ever gets to the point where they think they’ve absolutely mastered it and get it right every single time. I don’t think I have and I will continue to learn and develop and hopefully I’ll get to the point where I won’t get everything right but I’ll feel as if I’m able to make best use of the powers I’ve got.

‘The most important thing I’ve learned in the last 16 months — and it’s a very basic thing — is that you’ve got to have the confidence to trust your own instincts, and make your own decisions and if you get them wrong, try not to beat yourself up about it too much, but just learn from it. Equally, don’t pretend it didn’t happen — just learn from it. Because you can take as much advice as you want, and it’s important that you do, but ultimately if you don’t feel in your own gut that it’s the right thing to do then you’re not ever going to be comfortable with it.’

Another thing Obama says is that the easy decisions rarely reach his desk — if they’re easy they’ve already been taken further down the chain. He deals in probabilities, where there’s a 30–40% chance of getting it wrong. ‘That’s right — and that’s actually one of the other things I’ve learned. There is a tendency when you’re in the top job to try and interfere in every decision and so the decisions you don’t have to take… there’s as much a process of learning to let other people take them and don’t try to micro-manage them so you can focus on the things that really do need your attention and direction.’

Are you good at that? ‘I think I’m getting better,’ she says, a little unconvincingly. ‘I’m not sure I’m quite there yet — I think my colleagues might say I’ve still got a way to go, but I think I’m getting better at it… I do, genuinely.’ I imagine fixed grins and judicious silences from her Cabinet ministers.

“Women do things differently. But the idea they are not at times adversarial, argumentative and assertive is bunkum”

Unsurprisingly, she bristles at comparisons to Thatcher, but if they have little in common in ideological terms they indisputably share the still relatively rare achievement of being a woman in charge of a government. Where Thatcher is often criticised by feminists for doing little to advance the role of women while she was PM, Sturgeon has created a gender-balanced Cabinet and has said that she wants to use her powers to tackle the gender divide. With all apologies for what might seem a very blokeish question, does a woman bring something different to the top job? And if so, what?

‘I don’t like to overly generalise but I just think women do things differently — a different tone to things, probably a different approach. Equally, the idea that women are not at times adversarial, argumentative and assertive is bunkum as well.’

The most rewarding aspect of her first 16 months in power has been the response of other women. ‘Whoever had become the first woman first minister, I hope that they’d be able to say this: a wee girl down the stairs just gave me an Easter card and inside it she’s written “thank you for making me believe that I could one day be first minister”. It actually took me quite by surprise when I became first minister, just the number of women and girls, including quite young girls, that got in touch or emailed or wrote and it was nothing to do with party politics or me necessarily as a person, it was just to say in different ways how much it meant to them because it meant they believed these things were possible.’

It is extraordinary, even though we now largely take it for granted, that a political culture once as masculine as Scotland’s, with its politics of ships and steel and jowly Glaswegian Labour MPs, is now so feminised that three of the four main parties are led by women. If it largely happened by accident, most would agree it is a happy accident. How does it feel? Is she aware of how unusual it is?

‘I don’t really think about it on a day-to-day basis. I don’t go into the election TV debates thinking, “oh, it’s three women”, because we take it for granted, we’re doing it every week. But when you take a step back from that it’s just a fantastic image to project of the country. And it’s noticed in other countries. Partly because Scotland’s profile is higher post the referendum so people are much more conscious of things that are happening here. It’s a great image.’