Nicola Sturgeon's dominant loyalty is to her own self-image

There are many words for this style of leadership, none of them flattering. But, as the SNP - including some of her most devoted acolytes - are finding out this past week, she has not a scintilla of such loyalty in return.

In the new foreword to the paperback edition of her memoir, Frankly, she takes aim at First Minister John Swinney’s leadership and recent election strategy. While the SNP were returned to government in May, he shows a “lack of vision or big picture thinking.”

She has no intention of being a “back seat driver”, Sturgeon says, but thinks the SNP’s watering down of her left-wing environmentalism a “massive electoral blunder.”

Does she? Or is she as defiant about being questioned outside politics as when at the helm? As ever, Sturgeon’s post-politics utterances are an off-putting blend of personal and political disloyalty.

There’s also sizeable chutzpah in the mix here, given she loathed private interventions and public commentary about the SNP from her predecessor, the late Alex Salmond.

This includes his first, early, private caution: the folly of keeping her husband, Peter Murrell - now a convicted embezzler of party funds - as Chief Executive. Any contrition forthcoming from Sturgeon? Not a jot of it.

John Swinney, her loyal deputy through Covid, gender self-ID madness, and Murrell’s light- fingered approach to SNP coffers, was once described by Sturgeon as the most important person to her outwith her immediate family.

Last week, however, as his back didn’t hurt her knife too much, she used her foreword to further jab at other ‘friends’ and former colleagues.

None of the “obvious contenders” to Swinney’s premiership are, according to Sturgeon, likely to succeed. Given her reportedly close pal - Deputy First Minister Jenny Gilruth - is amongst the names often touted for such, I envisage awkwardness at their next dinner party.

Sturgeon will have known publishing her criticisms in this sales-hawking blaze of publicity would cause maximum carnage to the SNP. Inevitably, dozens of column inches would follow.

Happy to oblige, if only to point out the lack of chic.

This is someone for whom there was no such thing as a ‘friendly’ critic. Now, she’s content landing former colleagues – including proteges like education secretary Mairi McAllan – with grief.

McAllan usually exudes the beatific, practised sincerity of a trainee veterinarian. But, asked for her thoughts on Sturgeon’s comments, even she responded with a modicum of bite. “That’s a nonsense,” she snapped, before returning to her polished recitation of ‘everything- is-fine’ SNP party dogma.

Meanwhile, health secretary Angela Constance took pleasure – one hopes - in describing Swinney as “the best First Minister yet,” when facing the same questioning.

To both: welcome to the world of the many women Sturgeon has thrown under the bus before them. This is someone who showed more ‘sisterhood’ to double-rapist Isla Bryson/Adam Graham, than she did to former colleague Joanna Cherry MP.

Even when Cherry was threatened with death by rabid trans activists for opposing gender self-ID, Sturgeon offered zero compassion. It was more important to keep pushing the bizarre, authoritarian mantra men who wish to be women should be called ‘she/her’ if they want to be.

Asked this weekend at yet another book festival if she’d subsequently read Cherry’s memoir, Sturgeon responded by calling it “shit” and accusing her, and multi-talented author and philanthropist JK Rowling of being “obsessed” with her.

These splutterings are typically what happens when a mediocrity is pedestalled without the substance to sustain the praise. And, crucially, the person is cognisant of that. Sturgeon was never the ‘feminist to her fingertips’ she claimed to be. She needed devotees, having no support-base when handed the SNP leadership uncontested in 2014. Ambitious, faux-feminist eejits, and thrusting, young, gender-identity obsessives provided one.

She has no sisterhood. No loyalty. Not an iota of genuine solidarity exists for women who might want to follow her in leading her party. To even countenance the notion would be to admit any adult human female could.

That’s an idea that, to the mind behind Sturgeon’s baleful, schoolyard-level bitch of a legacy project, is anathema. Her dominant loyalty is to her own self-image and interest. It always has been.

There’s something doubly brutal about her sticking the knife in to Swinney. No man has humiliated himself more while loyally defending her idiotic gender policies, to the point of self-abasement, all while squandering thousands of pounds of taxpayer’s money on unwinnable court cases.

It’s one thing when highly-respected party grandees give their take on the substantially different direction taken by their party under a new leader. But Swinney, like Humza Yousaf before him, meticulously follows the direction Sturgeon took the country: downwards, on every important metric.

Though her new friends on the literary circuit may lack the political nous or courage to ask the right questions, Sturgeon left both her party and country in a worse state than she inherited them. Her refusal to take stock of this should make her obvious attempt to become some kind of sage, or political pundit, obsolete.

Floundering for purpose after leaving her beloved Scotland, for life in the vacuous bubble- world of the London-based literati, she’s seemingly unaware that outwith that world, loyalty still means something.

Far be it from me to defend the SNP, but perhaps Nicola Sturgeon’s biggest betrayal of her party – and most wrong-headed conviction – is believing they’re nothing without her.