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Nicola Sturgeon’s Quest for Scottish Independence

Sam Knight ("The New-Yorker")
Nicola Sturgeon’s Quest for Scottish Independence

The country’s leader asks voters which kind of society they prefer to live in: Brexit Britain or a social-democratic Scotland.

On a sharp morning on the southern edge of Glasgow, Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland and the leader of the Scottish National Party, arrived at a dentist’s office for a photo opportunity. Scotland has had its own government since the late nineties, when certain powers were devolved to the country, almost three hundred years after it formed a political union with England. The S.N.P., which has run Scotland since 2007, wants the country to secede from the United Kingdom altogether. On May 6th, Scottish voters will decide whether to reëlect the Party and back Sturgeon’s demand for the second independence referendum in a decade, which polls suggest that she might win. The previous day, announcing her party’s election manifesto, Sturgeon had promised to abolish the dentistry fees charged by the Scottish National Health Service. This was a typical S.N.P. policy: populist yet incremental, hinting at the broader, egalitarian future that awaits the country once it is fully free. The photo opportunity, at a clinic in the suburb of Thornliebank, involved the First Minister dangling some dental tools into the mouth of a child-size cuddly green dinosaur.

Sturgeon, who is fifty, is a political prodigy who made it all the way. In 1992, at the age of twenty-one, she was thought to be the youngest candidate to stand in Britain’s general election. She became known as a “nippy sweetie,” Glaswegian slang for a woman who is overly assertive. But now, among her many supporters (the S.N.P. is routinely twenty-five points ahead of its rival parties in Scotland), Sturgeon is “our Nicola.” In normal times, wherever she goes, she is rapidly surrounded by fans expecting selfies, encounters that she professes to enjoy. But, during the recent campaign, Scotland’s tight COVID restrictions made that impossible. Aides kept her movements secret, to prevent crowds from forming. During public engagements, Sturgeon moves with a certain diffidence, letting others go through doors first. When she stepped out of her government car at the dental clinic, wearing an overcoat of lipstick red, she made way for a pedestrian, who didn’t seem to notice her.

Inside, the First Minister posed gamely with the dinosaur, which reclined in a dentist’s chair. A few minutes later, she emerged to give an interview for a morning news show. Sturgeon is a perfectionist, a character trait that she ascribes to growing up as a very shy, working-class girl and then spending thirty years in the adversarial, male, and often privileged habitat of British politics. She compares her own inferiority complex, which she has largely conquered, to her country’s, which she has yet to overcome. “I’m always kind of thinking, I’ve got to prove myself,” she told me recently. “I’ve got to, you know, over and over again, demonstrate that I deserve to be doing what I’m doing. And that’s a very personal thing, but I think it’s mirrored to some extent in the national psyche of Scotland.”

Sturgeon crossed the street. Trash lay scattered in the grass. Above her head were plastic bags caught in the branches of a tree that was yet to bud. A construction truck went past. The subject was dentistry. Sturgeon took off her dark-blue tartan face mask. In the seconds before the camera went live, she bounced up and down on the balls of her feet, like a gymnast preparing to vault.

On September 18, 2014, the people of Scotland voted no to independence by fifty-five per cent to forty-five per cent, a margin of slightly less than four hundred thousand votes. The front man for the yes campaign, Alex Salmond, who had led the S.N.P. for twenty of the preceding twenty-four years, resigned. Both sides had agreed that the vote would be historic; Salmond called it a “once in a generation” event. But the defeat didn’t manifest as a defeat. Support for Scottish independence rose by fifteen points during the campaign. Young people flocked to the polls. S.N.P. membership surged. “The majority of people in Scotland were not yet ready, in 2014, to give up on the U.K.,” Blair Jenkins, who ran the yes campaign, recalled. “But we certainly got them a lot closer to that point than anyone could have imagined.”

Sturgeon, who had been Salmond’s deputy, succeeded him both as First Minister and as the leader of the Party. In the 2015 general election, the S.N.P. won all but three of Scotland’s fifty-nine parliamentary seats. (Under Britain’s devolved constitution, the S.N.P. fields candidates in both the U.K. Parliament, in Westminster, and the Scottish Parliament, in Edinburgh.)

The following year, in the Brexit referendum, sixty-two per cent of Scottish voters opted to remain in the European Union. The S.N.P. sees an independent Scotland taking its rightful place alongside other small states, such as Ireland, Denmark, and Finland, secure within the broader architecture of the E.U. In 2017, Sturgeon wrote to the Prime Minister at the time, Theresa May, asking for a Section 30 order, which, under Britain’s devolution legislation, would enable a second independence referendum—a request that still stands.

Sturgeon’s opponents acknowledge that she is probably Britain’s most talented politician. “God, she winds me up,” a former Conservative Cabinet minister told me. Sturgeon embodies an apparent oxymoron: a left-of-center nationalist. The S.N.P. is explicitly pro-immigration—it wants Scotland’s population to increase—and attentive to the rights of children, refugees, and trans people. Since the mid-nineties, the S.N.P. has tacked carefully to the left of Labour, opposing the Iraq War, in 2003, and displacing the Party from its historic dominance north of the English border. Scotland’s government controls about sixty per cent of spending in the country—the rest is overseen by London—and the S.N.P. has made the country’s tax code more progressive while also funding free university tuition and personal care for the elderly, and reducing the voting age to sixteen.

Sturgeon implores Scots “to work as if we are indeed living in the early days of a better nation,” a quote attributed to the Canadian poet Dennis Lee, but she complains that she must govern with one hand behind her back. Sturgeon would like to introduce a universal basic income, and wants Scotland to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2045, five years ahead of the rest of the U.K. She invites comparisons to other female leaders of beautiful, small, forward-thinking countries, such as Jacinda Ardern, of New Zealand, and Katrín Jakobsdóttir, of Iceland. Sturgeon has described Birgitte Nyborg, the fictional Prime Minister of Denmark in the TV show “Borgen,” as her favorite onscreen politician. In 2019, she gave a TED talk about the importance of placing measures of a country’s well-being ahead of its G.D.P.

At the same time, she is an absolutist, who yearns to break apart one of the world’s oldest and most successful democracies. “I think she is profoundly impressive,” the former Cabinet minister said. “But she is bad. . . . In the end, there is nothing that matters for her other than this dream of creating an independent Scotland, which, remember—if she won by one vote, she would prefer to split the country irrevocably.”

Defenders of the U.K.’s political union—a family of four nations and richly intermingled identities—point out the irony of using Brexit, a nationalist project that Sturgeon abhors, as a pretext for completing her own. But the S.N.P. has skillfully shifted the debate over Scottish independence away from history and constitutional arcana and toward the more pressing question of which kind of society voters would prefer to live in: Boris Johnson’s Brexit Britain or Nicola Sturgeon’s social-democratic Scotland. “It is a values proposition,” Will Tanner, a former Downing Street official, who now runs Onward, a center-right think tank, told me. “Really, it’s about, Who do you side with?”

The pandemic has increased the strains among the nations of the U.K. Many vital decisions concerning border controls and economic stimulus have been controlled by Johnson’s government, but health care is a devolved responsibility. Sturgeon was Scotland’s health secretary between 2007 and 2012, and she has taken personal charge of the coronavirus crisis. In the past year, Scotland’s public-health authorities have issued regulations that are subtly different, and generally more cautious, from those in England. Sturgeon herself has given more than two hundred televised briefings.

Although the effects of Scotland’s approach have not been striking (more than ten thousand people have died of Covid, and the country’s mortality rate has been in line with the rates of other regions of the U.K.), a poll found that seventy-eight per cent of voters approved of Sturgeon’s handling of the pandemic, compared with thirty-four per cent for Johnson. Last fall, support for Scottish independence reached fifty-eight per cent, the highest level on record.

I asked Sturgeon how Covid and the independence question were related. “What is independence?” she replied. “It’s self-government, and self-governance. And here we were, in the face of the biggest crisis that anybody can recall. Uncertain, scary, unpredictable. And people found that they were looking to their own government.”

The past year has accentuated Sturgeon’s leadership qualities. But it has also been politically traumatic. In 2018, Salmond, her predecessor and mentor, was accused of sexually harassing staff while he was in office. An investigation by Sturgeon’s government into the allegations was mishandled, and a subsequent criminal prosecution, in which Salmond was tried for attempted rape, ended in his acquittal.

The scandal ruined one of the most important relationships of Sturgeon’s life and came close to removing her from office. Earlier this year, two separate inquiries into the Salmond case explored whether Sturgeon had lied to the Scottish Parliament. She narrowly survived. “I think my political opponents—I don’t know, maybe Alex himself . . . There was an element of ‘We can break her,’ you know? Almost kind of personally as well as politically. That was how it felt,” Sturgeon told me. “And, you know, there were days when they might have come closer than they knew. But they didn’t.”

Glasgow Southside, the constituency that Sturgeon represents in the Scottish Parliament, stretches for some four miles along the River Clyde. For much of the twentieth century, its neighborhoods were a sulfurous mixture of tenements, engineering workshops, and heavy industry. In Govanhill, the sky glowed red from the ironworks. The Fairfield shipyard, in Govan, had the largest crane in the world: twelve vessels, from yachts to ocean liners and submarines, could be under construction at the same time. In 1880, the yard launched the Livadia, a steam yacht in the shape of a turbot, for the tsar of Russia. Clydeside became a laboratory for left-wing activism. During the First World War, Mary Barbour, a housing campaigner, whom Sturgeon says is one of her heroes, led a rent strike in Govan which spread across the city. In 1922, the Times of London complained that the district was rife with “socialist study circles, socialist economics classes, socialist music festivals, socialist athletics competitions, socialist choirs, socialist dramatic societies, socialist plays.” From the twenties until the aftermath of the financial crisis, “Red Clydeside,” like the rest of the city, elected an almost unbroken stream of Labour Members of Parliament. In 2010, all seven of Glasgow’s constituencies were held by Labour. By 2015, all seven had flipped to the S.N.P.

Sturgeon ran for office six times in Glasgow before winning her constituency, in 2007. (The Scottish Parliament has a hybrid electoral system: seventy-three members represent constituencies, and fifty-six are elected from regional lists.) During one campaign, to become a Westminster M.P., Sturgeon lived across the street from the writer Andrew O’Hagan. He put a note through her door, asking to meet. She was twenty-six, and practicing as a lawyer. O’Hagan was struck by her gift for language. Sturgeon is an avid reader. (At quiet moments, she tweets about what she is reading; last month, it was “The High House,” by Jessie Greengrass, a post-climate-change novel, set in East Anglia.) “She wasn’t hectoring, and she wasn’t even particularly campaigning,” O’Hagan recalled. “She had a way of speaking to people, as if she was actually just offering them a piece of local wisdom. . . . I remember thinking, If the weather is favorable, she’ll make a deep connection with Scottish people. Just because of the way she spoke.”

O’Hagan and Sturgeon both grew up outside Irvine, once a medieval harbor, an hour’s drive southwest of Glasgow. In 1781, the poet Robert Burns moved there to work with flax. But, in 1966, Irvine was designated as a “new town,” and redeveloped to rehouse families from Glasgow’s slums and as a site for new industries. Sturgeon lived in Dreghorn, a village on the edge of Irvine with unionist tendencies. When I visited last month, a few houses were flying Union Jacks at half-mast, to mark the death of Prince Philip. Sturgeon’s father, Robin, was an electrician. Her mother, Joan, who worked as a dental nurse, gave birth to her at the age of seventeen. The family (Sturgeon has a younger sister) lived in a small house owned by the local council, like most Scots at the time. Sturgeon was a studious child; she liked to read books under the kitchen table.

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister and began restructuring the British economy. Scotland’s heavy industry, trade unions, and relatively high levels of public spending made it especially vulnerable to Thatcher’s reforms, which were driven by a belief in “monetarism”—limiting the money supply, in order to control inflation—and a loathing of anything that might resemble socialism. Between 1979 and 1981, twenty per cent of Scotland’s industrial workers lost their jobs. Factories and mines closed. During the winter of 1982, when Sturgeon was twelve, unemployment in Irvine reached twenty-five per cent. “I’ve got an overwhelming sort of memory from back then, of this sense that if your dad lost his job he would never get another one, because unemployment was almost kind of terminal,” she said. “The people I was at school with, their prospects were pretty grim.”

Thatcherism came from somewhere else. “There was always something completely alien,” Sturgeon said. “You would listen to this very posh voice, talking about communities like the one I was growing up in.” In the eighties, Scotland was overwhelmingly represented by Labour M.P.s, but they were powerless to stop the damage. Sturgeon’s parents voted for the S.N.P., and she joined the Party when she was sixteen. At her first meeting, in the Volunteer Rooms, a community hall in Irvine, local members celebrated a recent opinion poll, which had estimated the Party’s share of the vote in double digits. “The S.N.P. couldn’t win a raffle, never mind an election,” Ricky Bell, a Party official who met Sturgeon that night, said.

The Party, which was founded in 1934, was in need of reform. In the 1987 general election, it won just three seats in Westminster. (Sturgeon campaigned for the Party in Irvine; it came in fourth.) In 1990, a young economist named Alex Salmond ran for the leadership. Sturgeon met Salmond, who is sixteen years her senior, when she was active in the Party’s youth wing. Historically, the S.N.P. had been derided as “tartan Tories,” but Salmond developed a coherent, center-left message. He made overtures to Catholic voters and helped reform the Party’s positions on the European Union (it had previously opposed Britain’s membership) and devolution, arguing that the S.N.P. should run candidates for a long-promised Scottish Parliament. Salmond also nurtured Sturgeon’s talent. In her mid-twenties, she was chosen to represent the Party in TV debates and on news programs. “I thought, and still do, that she had remarkable presentational skills, that she had a good political brain, and that she would develop into a formidable politician,” Salmond told me.

In the spring of 1999, Sturgeon became part of the first class of Members of the new Scottish Parliament. A few minutes before noon, on May 12th, Winifred Ewing, the oldest member of the new chamber, reconvened the Parliament, which had not sat since the Act of Union, in 1707. In 2004, Salmond made Sturgeon his deputy. By then, the S.N.P. was the official opposition in the Scottish Parliament, which was controlled by a coalition of Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Salmond was still an M.P., which made Sturgeon the Party’s de-facto leader in Edinburgh. “At that point, everything that everybody knew about Nicola Sturgeon was that she was the Alex Salmond loyalist,” Jack McConnell, a Labour peer, who was the country’s First Minister at the time, told me. “That was the perception—quite aggressive and very, very political.”

In the next three years, McConnell came to respect his adversary. “She conducted herself in a way that was appropriate in a leader,” he said. In 2007, the S.N.P. formed a minority government, and Salmond became First Minister. Sturgeon immersed herself in her job and her party. She married Peter Murrell, the chief executive of the S.N.P. They don’t have children. “There weren’t that many people who were able to challenge Alex. Nicola was probably one of the few who was able to,” Shona Robison, a former S.N.P. Cabinet secretary, who has known both politicians for thirty years, said.

One Scottish reporter noted how Sturgeon’s hand gestures came to resemble Salmond’s, as did her little preëmptive laugh when defusing a provocative question. A strategist who worked with the duo recalled that Salmond was unwilling to start meetings until Sturgeon was in the room. “They deferred to one another,” the strategist said. “In many ways, it seemed like quite an equal relationship.” In 2014, when Sturgeon took over as First Minister, she described her debt to Salmond as immeasurable. “Outside my mum and dad, and my husband now, he has been the most influential and important person in my adult life,” she told me. “Somebody—I don’t want to use this term too loosely—but somebody that I loved, on a level.”

Since coming to power, the S.N.P. has sought to play two roles: as a capable government and as the vanguard of a movement. The Party’s critics argue that its obsession with independence is a distraction from running the country. Scotland is still marked by deprivation; one in four children lives in poverty. Under the S.N.P., the country’s education system, which was once considered the best in the U.K., has continued a long decline. One afternoon, I walked through Govanhill, in Sturgeon’s constituency, where the city’s nineteenth-century tenements still stand. The neighborhood is among the most diverse in Scotland, with a large Roma population. I met Fatima Uygun, the manager of the Govanhill Baths Community Trust, an N.G.O. that has spent the past twenty years occupying and then restoring a once resplendent swimming pool.

During the pandemic, Uygun and her team paused the project in order to help out in the neighborhood. “We knew, very early on, that the people here were going to get a really good kicking,” she said. Uygun’s staff raised more than two hundred thousand pounds, mostly from government sources, to supply food to poor families and tablets and laptops to children who couldn’t go to school. The N.G.O. set up a temporary youth club, to organize street activities, and a low-cost, coöperative supermarket, called the People’s Pantry.

Uygun describes herself as a revolutionary socialist. Like many people on the left, and those at the leading edge of Scotland’s independence movement, she sees Sturgeon as a cautious figure who is resistant to transformational change. “I’ve been here for over twenty years. Govanhill has not improved. It’s gone downhill. We have lost services. The roads are manky. I’ve never seen so much rubbish about,” Uygun said. “There are more homeless people on the streets, you know?” Uygun acknowledged the S.N.P.’s anti-racism and Sturgeon’s leadership during the pandemic. “But when it comes to the bread and butter,” she said, “I don’t see life as improved.”

Nonetheless, Uygun observed that Sturgeon’s quest for independence struck a unifying chord in a neighborhood where more than fifty languages are spoken. For a long time, Govanhill had a large Irish Catholic community. “Independence from Britain has been something that has always been the case here,” Uygun said. “And then you have people like the Roma, who’ve never had it. All these things don’t on the surface sound like they should matter, but independence is really important.”

The previous week, Sturgeon had paid a visit to the People’s Pantry; a crowd gathered outside within minutes. “There is lots of shit I can say about Nicola Sturgeon, but when we have needed her for certain things she has delivered,” Uygun said. “People love her.” Sturgeon was one of the first politicians to endorse the group’s occupation of the Govanhill baths. I asked Uygun if she thought that Sturgeon did things like this out of political opportunism or if her motives were more sincere. “I don’t care,” Uygun replied. “We need her.”

That night, Sturgeon took part in an election debate on STV, Scotland’s main independent television channel. On the set, Sturgeon, who wore a white suit jacket over a black blouse and skirt, was flanked by five men: the STV moderator and the leaders of the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Greens.

Scotland’s electoral system has been designed to make it difficult for a single party to achieve a parliamentary majority. Since the most recent election, which took place seven weeks before the Brexit vote, in 2016, the S.N.P. has governed with support from the five M.S.P.s of the Scottish Greens, who also back independence. Sturgeon’s pitch this time around has been that if Scotland reëlects a majority of pro-independence M.S.P.s—in full knowledge of Brexit and of the ravages of the pandemic—then the case for a second referendum, to be held in 2023, will be undeniable. Going into the debate, an STV poll had found that the S.N.P. was on course to win a majority on its own.

During the broadcast, Sturgeon’s opponents highlighted shortcomings in the S.N.P.’s record: from water-supply problems at Glasgow’s largest hospital, which led to the deaths of two children, to inadequate ferry services and gaps in the educational progress of poorer students. Sturgeon has a habit, which can be risky for a politician, of conceding occasional mistakes. Douglas Ross, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, challenged her about Scotland’s rate of drug-related deaths, which is more than three times that of Sweden, the next most afflicted European nation. “I think we took our eye off the ball on drugs deaths,” Sturgeon admitted.

When Ross tried to change the subject to schools, Sturgeon brought him back: “I take the view that when politicians get things wrong—and we all get things wrong—it’s really important to face up to that.” Sturgeon played up the symbolism of being the only woman on the stage and the only person actually talking about winning the election. (The STV poll put the Conservatives in second place, with about twenty per cent of the vote.) “Listening to the gentlemen around me tonight,” Sturgeon said, “I think I’m the only one saying that I want to be in government and be First Minister.”

Brexit and Johnson, both deeply unpopular in Scotland, are favorite subjects of Sturgeon’s. She likes to mock her opponents, who also argued against Britain leaving the E.U., for their feebleness now that it has come to pass. During the STV debate, she turned on Willie Rennie, the leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats: “People in Scotland just have to accept being dragged out of the E.U. against their will, and there is nothing you can do about it?”

Brexit has consolidated support for a Scottish-independence referendum, but it is a complicating factor as well. Britain has now left both the E.U.’s single market and its customs union. As a result, new customs and border checks are conducted on most goods traded with Europe. If Scotland becomes independent, it will have to choose between borderless trade with the rest of the U.K., to which it exports around sixty billion pounds’ worth of goods a year, and joining the E.U.’s single market, to which it exports a quarter of that amount. In February, the London School of Economics calculated that, in trade terms, leaving the U.K. would be two or three times as damaging to Scotland’s economy as Brexit has been.

Sturgeon avoids the dilemma of an economic border with England, which has not existed for three centuries, by insisting that she doesn’t want one. “I don’t want to leave any single market,” she says. But other nationalists concede that the question of Scotland’s E.U. membership will be a knot in any upcoming referendum campaign, just as the future of Scotland’s currency—which the S.N.P. has also not resolved—was in 2014. When I asked Andrew Wilson, a former S.N.P. official who helped write a recent economic plan for an independent Scotland, whether the country would have to choose between the E.U.’s single market and that of the U.K., he replied, “Yeah, clearly.”

Johnson is also more problematic for Sturgeon than he seems. She does not appear to like him much. In the summer of 2019, the Prime Minister was booed loudly as he arrived at Bute House, the First Minister’s official residence, in Edinburgh. “We like to give people a welcome in Scotland,” Sturgeon deadpanned to reporters. Last month, she cautioned that Johnson would be like Donald Trump, in his contempt for the democratic process, if he resisted a second referendum. Nonetheless, Sturgeon must rely on him to give her what she wants. The Prime Minister has previously suggested that forty-one years—the passage of time between Britain’s two European referenda—is the “right sort of gap” for Scotland, which would delay a vote until 2055. Sturgeon does not trust Johnson. “It’s a strange thing,” she told me. “I think that, when he tells you something, he actually believes he’s telling the truth.” Her calculation is that Johnson will see that, if he denies Scotland a vote, he will make independence only more likely in the end. “I think, inevitably, political reality and political self-interest will kick in,” she said.

On the afternoon of April 2, 2018, Salmond arrived at Sturgeon’s house, in the East End of Glasgow. For about an hour, they spoke alone in the dining room. During the conversation, Salmond showed Sturgeon a letter he had received on March 7th, from Scotland’s most senior civil servant, telling him that he was under investigation for sexual harassment during his time as First Minister. The previous November, two officials, who became known as Ms. A and Ms. B, raised concerns about Salmond’s behavior. Ms. A later alleged that Salmond had sexually assaulted her one night in December, 2013, when she had been working alone with him in a bedroom at Bute House, and they had been drinking Maotai, a type of Chinese liquor.

The allegations did not come out of nowhere. In the fall of 2017, weeks into the #MeToo movement, complaints that staff at Edinburgh Airport made about Salmond were picked up by reporters and relayed to Sturgeon, but they did not become public. (A police investigation led to no charges.) Since stepping down as the leader of the S.N.P., Salmond had become an awkward figure for Sturgeon. In 2017, after losing his seat in the House of Commons, he performed a smutty show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Salmond also agreed to host a program, which he still presents, on RT, the Kremlin-backed Russian news network.

Nonetheless, the details and the seriousness of the allegations startled Sturgeon, who had overseen the development of a new harassment-complaints procedure for the Scottish government, as a response to #MeToo. “My head was spinning,” she later recounted. While Salmond talked, Sturgeon was acutely conscious of her multiple roles—as a friend, a political ally, a government leader, and a woman. “I remember leaving the room at one point,” she told me. “I think I said that I was going to make a cup of tea, and going to the bathroom and feeling physically sick.”

Salmond was determined to fight the allegations, and, in the course of multiple meetings and telephone calls, he asked Sturgeon to intervene. She did not. She has not spoken to Salmond since. I asked her if she thought that Salmond had registered that he had done anything wrong. “I didn’t get the sense that he had really understood why he should have apologized,” Sturgeon said. “And I didn’t get the sense then, and I don’t get the sense now, that he understood the aspect of abuse of power that was at play.”

During the summer of 2018, Salmond’s lawyers identified a critical problem with the Scottish government’s handling of the allegations. According to the new procedure, when the complaints were made, an investigating officer who had had no prior contact with the people involved should have been appointed. Instead, the officer on the case had been in touch with Ms. A and Ms. B since they came forward with their concerns. In January, 2019, Salmond won a legal challenge against the Scottish government, for which he was awarded five hundred and twelve thousand pounds in legal costs.

The following spring, Salmond was prosecuted for fourteen sexual offenses, alleged by ten women. During the trial, he was accused by civil servants and S.N.P. officials of kissing them on the mouth and grabbing their bottoms, and of stroking an aide’s face while she slept in a car. Salmond’s defense team described him as a “touchy-feely, tactile person,” whose behavior fell short of being criminal. Salmond acknowledged some of the incidents. He described the alleged assault at Bute House as “a sleepy cuddle,” for which he had apologized in 2013, and another attempt to kiss a staffer, while reënacting a Jack Vettriano painting, as “high jinks.” He said he’d stroked the aide’s face to wake her up. He denied any nonconsensual acts. He was acquitted of twelve charges, one charge was dropped during the trial, and another was deemed not proven.

The flawed investigations of Salmond rebounded badly on Sturgeon. Scottish politics is a small place. Many people believed that Sturgeon had been willing to ignore her mentor’s inappropriate behavior as long as it suited her political goals. “This was an open secret in Scottish politics going back to 2014,” Murdo Fraser, a Conservative M.S.P., told me. In August, 2020, Sturgeon admitted to a Scottish Parliament inquiry that she had failed to disclose a meeting with Geoff Aberdein, Salmond’s former chief of staff, four days before the April 2nd meeting with Salmond. A second inquiry, into whether Sturgeon had misled Parliament and breached Scotland’s ministerial code, followed, led by James Hamilton, a former chief prosecutor in Ireland.

Although the details of the scandal were mazelike, the spectacle of the overlapping inquiries was terrible for the S.N.P. Sturgeon was struck by how much she had to lose. “There is a deep structural sexism and misogyny about it,” she said. “We still have this thing that, you know, how a woman who is close to a powerful man who behaves inappropriately . . . It is actually much more important to scrutinize her than the behavior itself.” During the first three months of this year, which coincided with the rollout of Britain’s successful vaccination program, support for Scottish independence slid back toward fifty per cent. Salmond was unrepentant. Giving evidence to the parliamentary inquiry, he described a “prolonged, malicious, and concerted” conspiracy to remove him from public life and accused Sturgeon of breaking several ministerial rules. When I asked him why he had tried to destroy his former protégée, he chuckled for several seconds. “If I wanted to destroy her, that could have been done,” he said.

On March 18th, a leak revealed that a committee of M.S.P.s would conclude that Sturgeon had misled Parliament. But their report did not say that she had done so knowingly. The news broke on a Thursday evening. Over the weekend, her premiership hung in the balance. Sturgeon had accepted that she would resign if the Hamilton inquiry into her own conduct found that she had broken the rules. At two minutes past midnight on Monday morning, John Swinney, Sturgeon’s deputy, received a copy of Hamilton’s report, which examined four possible breaches of Scotland’s ministerial code. Sturgeon was cleared of all four. “It was the most colossal relief to me to see that,” Swinney said.

The Salmond scandal and the danger it posed to Sturgeon revealed how much of the S.N.P.’s political appeal—and the independence movement as a whole—is now vested in her personally. Hamilton’s report was not made public until the afternoon. For hours, Scottish politicians and reporters kept an eye on the Scottish government’s Web site. Robison, Sturgeon’s old friend and S.N.P. ally, sat at her kitchen table, refreshing the page on her laptop. When she grasped Hamilton’s conclusions, she burst into tears. “When you think about all those years of effort, of progress, of everything, that was all in that one basket,” Robison told me. “She is so central to the cause.”

The Scottish election campaign began three days later. One of Sturgeon’s last official acts, before Parliament adjourned, was to propose a pay increase of at least four per cent to Scotland’s National Health Service staff, in recognition of their work during the pandemic. (Three weeks earlier, Johnson had offered staff in England a one-per-cent raise.) When people said that Sturgeon looked tired, she said that she was tired. That weekend, Bell, Sturgeon’s S.N.P. friend from Irvine, hosted a virtual launch of her constituency campaign in Glasgow Southside. Sturgeon sat in her dining room at home, with a backdrop of the Saltire, Scotland’s flag. Paul Anderson, a fiddler from Aberdeenshire, played a tune he had composed, “Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland.” Sturgeon put on her glasses. Her mouth was set. She remembered, every minute or two, to smile at the screen.

The threat from Salmond had not passed. The day before, he had announced that he would be leading a new independence party, Alba, in the coming elections. Although Salmond has been discredited in many voters’ eyes, he remains a compelling figure for some nationalists, who believe that he has a cunning and a daring, especially when dealing with the U.K. government, that Sturgeon cannot match. “The problem that Nicola has, and it is one entirely of her own making, is that the case for independence hasn’t advanced one iota since 2014,” Salmond said. Alba’s early campaign materials were unashamedly jingoistic, invoking Robert the Bruce and medieval battles with England. Salmond told me that he imagines Alba as an opposition nationalist party, challenging the S.N.P. to be bolder.

The split between Sturgeon and Salmond is not only personal. There is a faction within the Party that sees Sturgeon as too controlling and too passive, and wants her to seek a referendum through the courts or to use Scotland’s parliamentary elections as a plebiscite on independence. In the days after Alba launched, two S.N.P. M.P.s in Westminster defected. “The time is now,” another disgruntled M.P. said. “But the time for everything for Nicola seems to be procrastination.” The discord within the movement is a gift for Johnson. A recent poll suggests that Alba may win as many as eight seats in the Scottish Parliament. The unified message of the S.N.P., which has long been fundamental to its rise, has frayed. “They are not riven down the middle,” a senior U.K. official told me. “But they are riven.”

Sturgeon’s campaign has focussed on the pandemic and its aftermath. “The dividing line in this election on every issue is between those who want to vie to be the opposition and those of us who are serious,” she says. The S.N.P., in its manifesto, promises to increase Scotland’s N.H.S. funding by twenty per cent and to raise the country’s social-care budget by a quarter. It offers a “minimum income guarantee”—a first step toward a universal basic income—and plans for free child care for one- and two-year-olds from low-income families.

If the S.N.P. wins on May 6th and Sturgeon forms a fourth successive pro-independence government, Johnson is expected to turn down her request for a second referendum. “Now is not the time” is the line used by his officials. In Sturgeon’s eyes, making momentous choices is exactly what societies should be doing after the pandemic. “People talk about recovery as if it’s some kind of neutral concept,” she said. “It’s not. What you recover to is down to the choices you make, and the values that underpin those.”

S.N.P. activists often say that English people, and English politicians, just don’t get what lies at the heart of their desire for independence. It is both a complaint and the engine of their political success. “Most people here in Scotland, subliminally, have spent their whole lives being told that we are not capable of being an independent country,” Sturgeon told me. Johnson and his ministers are in no danger of ever feeling that, which is why her cause will never die. “They don’t seem to understand that on an emotional level, that having things done to you . . . You know, people don’t like that in their individual lives,” she said. “So why should a country put up with it?” ♦

Published in the print edition of the May 10, 2021, issue, with the headline “Separation Anxiety.”

 

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