Review of Frankly by Nicola Sturgeon (Macmillan, 2025)
In spring 2023, Nicola Sturgeon resigned as first minister of Scotland and leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP). Two and a half years later, she has resurfaced as a writer, with a political memoir titled Frankly.
Unfortunately, Sturgeon isn’t very good at writing. In fact, she is quite bad at it. Her prose is flat, her sentences frozen. Sturgeon describes her upbringing in Ayrshire in the 1970s and ’80s as “loving, and quite traditional. I could not have wished for a better mum and dad.” An early electoral defeat in the 1990s left her “deeply despondent. I spent much of the day wallowing in bed.”
Faced with the global financial crash in 2008, Alex Salmond, Sturgeon’s mentor at the time and head of the Scottish government, was “a man on a mission.” In their meetings, former British prime minister David Cameron exuded an “effortless charm.” Issues “gnaw away” at Sturgeon, ministerial sackings serve a “massive blow.” Silences are “stunned,” successes “roaring,” marches always “stolen.”
Frankly concludes in the most toe-curlingly trite way, as though Sturgeon has lifted feel-good advice from a refrigerator magnet: “I’ve learned now, no matter how tough things are, to make the most of every day, to see the upside in every situation . . . I’ve learned to dance in the rain.”
The hoped-for accolades here — in keeping with current confessional trends — are “raw,” “brave,” “honest,” and…
Auteur: Jamie Maxwell
