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With a book to peddle, Nicola Sturgeon is popping up all over, including on ITV last night, where she sat down with Julie Etchingham. Ah, the tough interview.
Once time was deducted for some introductory ambling along a windswept coast, the proceedings lasted about 25 minutes, and even then it dragged on.
Nicola Sturgeon somehow seems incapable of providing any insight into Nicola Sturgeon.
What was it like being arrested during the SNP finances investigation? ‘Utterly traumatic,’ she told Etchingham.
Naturally. What was it like seeing her husband arrested and led away?
She hadn’t seen it happen, and didn’t have a clear memory of how she felt about it. OK, then.
Once the police had left, she fled to her parents’ house and watched the news, where she saw her house ‘looking like a murder scene’.
Sure, everyone said that at the time. It was the forensic tent and the police tape.
Nicola Sturgeon meets Julie Etchingham on the Ayrshire coast
That’s Netflix serial killer documentary stuff. The only thing missing was the old dear next door saying: ‘She didn’t seem the type to have 15 bodies buried under the patio.’
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What could she tell us about the experience? About how it affected her?
Very little, in truth. Every attempt to elicit a description of her feelings at the time brought the same staccato, one-word responses: ‘Horror’, ‘upset’, ‘shame’.
The whole point of book interviews is to dole out enough meaty little morsels of information that people will be driven to buy and read.
She provided nothing like that in her conversation with Etchingham. If she can’t manage 25 minutes of vaguely compelling chat, what must the book be like?
Nothing new that she said was interesting, and nothing interesting was new.
The SNP hadn’t done enough prep work when David Cameron granted the referendum, and the White Paper needed more research. (We noticed.)
She used to talk to Alex Salmond inside her head. (Well, he was living there rent-free, after all.)
We were treated to a discussion of her new tattoo, a self-designed infinity symbol tipped with an arrow and etched onto her right wrist.
‘Midlife crisis alert!’ Sturgeon yelped.
‘Midlife crisis alert,’ Etchingham purred. Imagine Frost/Nixon but with all the depth of an Instagram post.
On matters of politics and policy, it was as though she had done no self-reflection since leaving office.
Asked why she failed to deliver in government, she cited the pandemic. Nasty old pandemic.
The former first minister interviewed by Julie Etchingham
Ms Sturgeon revealed a new infinity symbol with an arrow tattoo on her wrist
Not only did it confine us all to our homes in 2020 and 2021, it went all the way back to 2014 to stop Scotland’s First Minister keeping any of her promises.
For the briefest of moments, she seemed to acknowledge her error in refusing to say that Isla Bryson, who was briefly placed in a women’s prison, was in fact a man.
Rapists, she said, ‘forfeit their right’ to self-identify their gender, then, under the lightest of pushbacks from Etchingham, she took it back.
Under questioning about her sexuality, she remained coy, which was fair enough. Her private life is her own affair.
What was infinitely more difficult to watch, and the only section of the programme that actually carried any weight, was her memories of the miscarriage, of the guilt that burdens her still.
Nicola Sturgeon was a terrible First Minister, a serial breaker of promises, a spinner without substance, and for all that I’m happy to decry her.
But she is also the mother of a little girl who never was – ‘she would be 14 now,’ she mused – and a lifelong bearer of the ungodly pain that comes with baby loss.
She told Etchingham she was ‘happy being my own person now’. On that, at least, I’m glad for her.
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