Sturgeon: Scotland's Ruin
She was once seen as a political colossus but now Nicola Sturgeon has been cut down to size by her own hubris. The problem is her legacy, a culture of lies and secrecy, remains alive and well.
“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away”
- ‘Ozymandias’, by Percy Bysshe Shelley
As she arrived at the COVID Inquiry in Edinburgh on Wednesday, Nicola Sturgeon wasn’t yet ready to give up the game. Not for her the status of some relic of the past, like the broken statue of an ancient Pharoah, Shelley imagined stranded in a windblown desert.
By the time she had finished giving evidence though Sturgeon looked like she’d have been quite happy to be transported to the desert and left alone like Ozymandias. Her tragedy is she knows she has more to endure. So much more. She has yet fully to experience what is left of her reputation being brought down upon her ears in the slow motion of investigations unfolding in the present and those that look ever more likely in the future.
The protagonists of a Greek drama, like the one Sturgeon now inhabits, can at least hope to earn our sympathy; if only after a long process of endurance. Some of her supporters are already angling for that process to be short-circuited. Chris Deerin of the New Statesman complained about the “unpleasant witch-hunt element” to the Inquiry coverage.
If anyone knows what a witch-hunt feels like it will be Sturgeon. She’s conducted so many over the years.
Other supporters took to social media to compare her treatment both at the Inquiry and in subsequent media coverage, like BBC Question Time, to that meted out to Boris Johnson. But there’s something crucial these supporters are deliberately ignoring.
Boris Johnson never sold himself as a paragon of truth. No one in their right mind ever imagined him as a moral exemplar. If Rishi Sunak sold himself at all it was merely as ….a safe pair of technocratic hands. The problem about Oor Nicola was her shtick was predicated on her alleged ethical superiority, and by extension Scotland’s.
Her performance at the Inquiry suggested Sturgeon was still desperate to hold on to her gilded image. Forced to acknowledge she had promised, in response to a question by Channel 4 journalist Cieran Jenkins, that she would not only hand in any relevant messages to the Inquiry, she would have no legal option but to do so, she now ducked and dived. After nearly ten minutes of trying to deny she had done anything as mundane as “deleted” her messages, she ran out of road and finally had no choice but to confirm, she had.
Did you delete the Whatsapp messages, asked KC Dawson.
Yes.
Dawson then wondered why she had tended to give the impression during the pandemic of being the cat that got the cream, strutting about as if she believed she was the right kind of Leader to handle a health emergency. Sturgeon’s gymnastics became even more elaborate, climaxing in her attempt at something truly daring: a Double Kleenex; the equivalent of a Produnova Vault, that acrobatic combination so dangerous it’s been dubbed the "vault of death". Her ego did not survive the attempt. Sniff.
Of all the pop-corn rich moments my favourite was when Lady Hallett intervened to probe a detail for herself. Sturgeon had been trying to defend herself from the claim she had set out to achieve Zero COVID, something no health expert thought realistic other than Devi Sridhar, Sturgeon’s own rather easy on the eye fitness guru. Sturgeon replied that she and the adorable Devi had merely been determined to achieve “maximum suppression”. This would be remotely believable if Devi hadn’t conducted a one woman publicity campaign suggesting Zero COVID was around the corner.