Frankly by Nicola Sturgeon review - 'therapy in action'

The former first minister began putting pen to paper in the aftermath of her arrest in June 2023, a time when she admits she was in “a bad state mentally”.

The result is the story of an extraordinary political career and the contradictory human being at the centre of it, a woman who found herself, in her 50s, worrying that she “didn’t really know who Nicola the person was, and that if I waited much longer it might become too late for me to find out”.

As a child in Dreghorn, a former mining village in Ayrshire, Sturgeon combined shyness with a burning ambition. She devoured books and studied obsessively.

“I had - at risk of sounding daft - a very strong sense of ‘destiny’; a feeling that whatever I did in life would not be ‘ordinary’, that it would attract attention,” she writes, in a sentence that could only be penned by a politician.

Her political journey started just a few months shy of her seventeenth birthday, when she knocked on the door of local SNP candidate Kay Ullrich. I loved Sturgeon’s description of Ullrich, who “drove with a cigarette in one hand, a loudspeaker in the other and, at times, only her knee on the steering wheel”.

The book contains moments of unusual candidness. Sturgeon writes of having a panic attack while struggling to knock the independence White Paper into shape. “I ended up on the floor of my home office, crying and struggling to breathe.”

There is a moving account of her miscarriage in early 2011, in which she reveals she was “deeply conflicted” about the pregnancy because of the potential impact on her political role, and later “consumed by guilt” when she lost the baby.

Elsewhere, she writes of coming “perilously close to a breakdown” following her evidence to the UK Covid Inquiry, during which she cried on the witness stand.

Sturgeon also addresses those persistent rumours of a gay affair, dismissing the “wild” stories but adding that she has “never considered sexuality, my own included, to be binary”.

But this is also, in other ways, a frustrating read. Partly that’s because of the massive elephant in the room. Her estranged husband, Peter Murrell, was charged with embezzlement last year, meaning there are legal restrictions over what she can say about the police investigation. This may be understandable, but it leaves a gaping hole in the narrative.

Sturgeon also fails to address other issues, such as the deleted Covid WhatsApp messages that caused so many damaging headlines, or the lack of any succession planning when she stood down as SNP leader. Her admission that she wishes she had “hit the pause button” on controversial gender reforms will do little to assuage her critics.

Her account of her relationship with Alex Salmond, and its subsequent breakdown, is fascinating. She “agonised” over whether to write about it, but decided she could not let claims of a conspiracy against him “stand unchallenged”. Her eyebrow-raising suggestion that he may have leaked details of an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct against him in order to paint himself as a victim has been furiously rejected by his allies.

Sturgeon clearly found the writing of this book cathartic. But when it comes to her legacy, it will be far from the final word.