‘The independence movement has proven itself resilient’

There was a time when British politicians were not so at the mercy of events, when their support was based on granite, not sand. Nicola Sturgeon was one of them.

As leader of the Scottish National party between 2014 and 2023, she won eight elections in a row — if you count council and European elections, which she very much does. She made nationalism appear progressive, even reasonable. During Covid, she was the political antidote to Boris Johnson — the prime minister whom, WhatsApp messages later revealed, she judged “a fucking clown”.

But the Sturgeon who arrives to meet me in central Edinburgh is more fallible. Windswept by the Scottish winter, she sheds her bright red jacket and slides into the booth. She orders a no-alcohol G&T: a fitting cocktail of control and openness.

Her fallibility today is partly by design. Resigning as Scotland’s first minister in February 2023, she said she wanted to spend time on “Nicola Sturgeon the human being”. Aged 54, she talks about novels, the gym and life “post-politics” (she is still a member of the Scottish Parliament). “I probably hadn’t been alone in a public place for 10 years. You have to relearn how to live,” she says frankly.

But the fallibility is also unwanted. A party funding scandal led to her being arrested in June 2023: she denies wrongdoing but remains under police investigation; her husband has been charged. This looms over her record — as does her failure to find a path to Scottish independence.

Even before that, political gravity was finally tugging at her. Sturgeon had become the feminist accused of violating women’s rights, the social democrat blamed for poor public services, and the campaigner for decentralisation who was herself said to hoard decisions in a clique.

In 2024’s wave of anti-incumbent election results, the SNP lost most of its seats in Westminster. How much responsibility does she take? “I take a fair chunk of responsibility,” she says. “Whether I always sound it or not, I’m somebody who tends to blame myself for things. But the more time that passes, I think it’s harder to keep blaming me for things . . . There’s some irony: the SNP didn’t lose an election when I was leader, but somehow the first one that they lost when I wasn’t leader was all my fault.”

Sturgeon is a study in the potential — and perhaps the limitations — of being a first-class political communicator. As rightwing populism advances across the west, she is a reminder that the centre-left too can channel voters’ anger, that it does not have to be bland, even if it doesn’t have all the answers.

She insists to me that she is “by nature a really shy and introverted person”. As leader, “going into a room, there would always be a moment of having to steel myself to go and do it”. Yet like Tony Blair before her, she could stand on the shakiest ground without her voice betraying a wobble. She had an X-factor.

I ask if that is often the decisive factor in politics. Take Donald Trump’s victories. Did Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris just lack charisma? “I absolutely think that’s true, I just think there is a very gendered idea of what charisma is.”

In Westminster, Labour’s Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have fallen flat in their first six months in power. They are, Sturgeon says, “just so wooden and stilted”. Is it too late for them to learn charisma? “There’s something quite depressing about the notion that unless you’re a Boris Johnson-type showman, you can’t be successful in politics. Even as somebody from a different political tradition, there is a part of me that wants to see them succeed . . . I just think the political climate we live in right now makes that really difficult, that very serious, managerial approach.”

She is scathing of the Labour government’s “unbelievably terrible” decision to cut winter fuel benefits to pensioners before raising taxes on business. Labour claims that fuel subsidies had to be cut earlier for administrative reasons. “As someone who’s spent a long time in government . . . these sound like the sort of excuses you’d come up with to explain your own stupidity.”

She fears that the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage may end up as prime minister. “Five years ago, I would have said it’s impossible. I don’t think that any more.” Starmer should “make the case for immigration . . . The more he tries to be tougher, and offers solutions that are never going to solve the problem, the more he colludes with the idea that the biggest issue facing the country is out-of-control immigration.”

Sturgeon’s chosen restaurant is closed on Mondays, and she astutely declined its offer to open just for us. So we are at Howies, a busy Scottish diner near Princes Street, with antlers on its walls. No one accosts Sturgeon, but the waiters almost fall over themselves to serve us.

The “most dangerous woman in Britain”, The Daily Mail dubbed my guest in 2015, after she beat Farage, David Cameron and then Labour leader Ed Miliband in a TV debate. I wouldn’t put her in the top five most dangerous women in the restaurant.

Many unionists saw Sturgeon as anti-English. She strains to come across differently. When I mention the town of Kirkcaldy, she tells me I have pronounced it “almost perfectly . . . Did you understand a word that people in Kirkcaldy said to you? Because I don’t,” she jokes.

She orders haggis and a chicken salad. I smell a cliché. Would she normally order haggis? “No — yeah . . . I’m not just doing it for show!” she laughs.

The cause of Scottish independence has marked Sturgeon’s entire adult life. The child of a working-class family in western Scotland, she joined the SNP aged 16, outraged by Margaret Thatcher. She stood for Westminster as a 21-year-old, when the party was a fringe concern. She became leader after 2014’s Scottish independence referendum, when it had nearly achieved the unthinkable.

The day after the UK’s 2016 Brexit vote, she said a second independence referendum was “highly likely”. Now it’s “off the radar . . . But in younger age groups, support for independence is 60, 65, 70 per cent. They’re not changing their minds as they get older. The demographics are very firmly in one direction. I do think Scotland will be independent within our lifetimes, absolutely.”

The “conundrum” is how to get there. Sturgeon spent years “banging my head against a brick wall” of refusals from Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. She wants agreed conditions under which Westminster would permit a referendum — comparable to those that exist in Northern Ireland.

Brexit “strengthened the case [for independence], but also complicated it,” she says. Nearly two-thirds of Scots voted to remain in the EU, but the bloc is in tumult: “The EU’s going to have a rocky few years.” One route to a referendum would be if Johnson, unpopular in Scotland, returns to frontline politics; Sturgeon predicts he will. But a bigger boost for independence might be “if Starmer shatters that illusion” that some centrist Scots have about a UK Labour government.

“Sometimes things can feel really stuck, then suddenly they’re not,” she argues. After the Tories’ surprise UK election win in 1992, a Scottish parliament seemed two decades away at least. “Seven years later, I was sitting in it.”

Our starters arrive. “Vegan haggis?” Sturgeon asks sceptically of mine. Awkwardly, the plates coincide with one of the most sensitive topics: the feud over trans rights. The atmosphere cools, as does the food. As first minister, Sturgeon proposed an easier process for changing one’s legal gender. The author JK Rowling, worried about women’s safety, labelled her a “destroyer of women’s rights”. A furore ensued when Isla Bryson, who raped two women as a man before identifying as a woman, was placed in a women’s prison.

With hindsight, does Sturgeon think that LGBT+ activists over-reached, and that some risks were overlooked? It’s quickly apparent that she doesn’t. “The legal system we were trying to introduce has existed in the Republic of Ireland for years without any of the terrible consequences that were predicted here . . . If I was to sit here today and say I just wouldn’t do it, that would be to make my own life easier.” She blames “scapegoating”.

Taking a forkful of what the Scots call neeps and the English call swede, I ask her: can she say now if Bryson the prisoner was a man or a woman? “That person was a rapist,” she says, forcefully repeating her non-answer from the time. It grates just as much the second time.

The SNP has shifted away from some of Sturgeon’s agenda, becoming more centrist and less green. “I think care needs to be taken in moving the party away from the position from which it won eight elections under me and I can’t remember how many under Alex [Salmond] before me . . . If you want to move it away from that, be careful that you know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it and that you’ve thought through the electoral consequences.”

So how, I ask, can politicians sell the climate transition? Sturgeon urges Covid-style “straight-talking” about how the costs will be shared. Politicians will become “more and more out of touch with the younger generation in particular, who still see climate as one of the top issues . . . I get really frustrated with the oil and gas debate here.”

She cites a forecast about declining North Sea oil output — she is one of the only politicians I’ve interviewed who, after giving a statistic, advises me to double-check it.

Sturgeon’s mentor was Alex Salmond, her predecessor as Scotland’s first minister, who died suddenly in October. Salmond was a brilliant debater and a bully. “He would be really rough on people. Many times I intervened to stop him.”

After Sturgeon’s Scottish government pursued sexual harassment allegations against Salmond, the two spectacularly fell out. “I had come to accept that I’d probably never speak to him again — partly because I didn’t think he would want to speak to me, but also because, had he turned up on my doorstep one day, unless he had been prepared to acknowledge some of the things that he had done, I wouldn’t have wanted to do that.”

Salmond was acquitted of sexual assault charges in 2020 and remained estranged from Sturgeon after he set up the rival pro-independence Alba party the following year. Did his death change anything for her? “No . . . I came to the conclusion that I probably grieved for Alex four years, five years ago.” She knows women who complained about him. “I’ve seen the impact not just of what they believe happened to them initially but also the impact of the way he then behaved. It’s been pretty hard.”

That affair made it more difficult to argue that an independent Scotland would improve much on Westminster. So too did the SNP’s shortcomings in power — from falling maths scores in schools to Europe’s highest rate of drug deaths.

“The independence movement is bigger than any one or two individuals, and it has proven itself pretty resilient,” Sturgeon says. “An independent Scotland is not going to be magically better. It will be down to how well it’s governed, and the political choices that people make: the difference is it will be our choices.”

Sturgeon has started on her chicken salad. Blair advises leaders that their family is a crucial hinterland away from politics. Yet Sturgeon’s husband, Peter Murrell, was the SNP’s chief executive. “Yeah, yeah. It was all-consuming for a long, long time,” she admits quietly.

Murrell was charged in April in connection with the embezzlement of SNP funds, which he denies. The backdrop is that more than £600,000 was raised for a new independence campaign but potentially used for other purposes; a luxury camper van was seized by police from outside the home of Sturgeon’s mother-in-law. Has the scandal scarred her post-politics life? “If you described the scenario before it happened, I would have [said] how on Earth would I be able to function? But I have.”

Liz Lloyd, Sturgeon’s former chief of staff, said that even Sturgeon would admit that having a husband and wife in the two top jobs was not ideal. Is that true? Sturgeon brings the shutters down swiftly and firmly. “Yep. I’m not trying to dodge it, I just think it takes us too close to the substance of the issue” — that is, the police investigation.

She has also faced questions from the UK’s Covid inquiry. She admitted deleting her WhatsApps from the period, because retaining them on her phone was “not secure”. She seems sceptical of the lengthy inquiry: “Most other major countries have had their Covid inquiry . . . long gone.” She didn’t think the counsel were asking the right questions, “but we’ll see.”

Given that Sturgeon’s leadership seemed so much better than Johnson’s, why did England and Scotland have similar death rates? Sturgeon insists Scotland’s age-standardised mortality rate was “quite significantly lower”. When I later check the source, I see she’s right, although experts are cautious about linking this to policy decisions.

Her chicken salad seems at best half-finished, but she has had enough. As a metaphor for her leadership of the independence movement, it writes itself.

We discuss why ex-politicians find it hard to admit mistakes. Angela Merkel, whom Sturgeon admires, admitted to failings only on “second-order” issues. Judging by her comments on gender recognition, Sturgeon seems likely to follow suit in her own forthcoming memoir, due to be published this summer. Before she joined the SNP, she supported nuclear disarmament. Has she changed her view? “I’m still pretty [much] where I was then,” she says, outlining the cases against nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The path of the pro-independence politician is to hope that other people’s opinions change, even as your own stay the same.

She rules out a comeback: “I wouldn’t go back.” With a smile, she hints that she won’t stand for re-election to the Scottish Parliament in 2026. She again mentions her quest to be a human being “or as close to a human being as I’ll ever manage to get”. She finishes a peppermint tea, while the neighbouring tables sink into more traditional festive drinks.

The Nicola Sturgeon I met is a human, and an affable one. Yet a full assessment surely depends on where the police investigation ends. How strange that the politician who never seemed at the mercy of events finds her reputation in the exact opposite place.

Henry Mance is the FT’s chief features writer

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