Frankly, p.23
Frankly, page 23
When I got home to Glasgow that night, I had a glass of wine and cried. I wasn’t sad, just utterly drained. I was proud of the campaign; of those who had led Yes Scotland and of the armies of volunteers who had brought us to the brink of a possible victory. I knew that there were many things we could, maybe should, have done better. I felt in my gut that if we didn’t win, it would be down to fears over currency and economic sustainability. Had we been convincing enough to give people the reassurance they needed? I feared that the answer to that was no. As such a key figure in the campaign, the lion’s share of responsibility rested on my shoulders. However, I knew that I had devoted every ounce of energy I had to the cause.
I also knew that whatever the outcome, we had pulled off something extraordinary. Even just six months previously, I could not have comprehended going to bed the night before polling day feeling that victory was within grasp. I had just fallen asleep when my phone buzzed with news that Andy Murray had tweeted support for Yes. We had been trying, indirectly through a friend of his, to get him over the line for ages and had all but given up hope. It was probably too late now for it to make any difference, but, still, I was delighted.
I went to sleep happy, excited and more nervous than I had ever been before.
Finally, 18 September 2014 dawned. Scotland’s date with destiny.
I voted early at my local polling station in Broomhouse Community Hall in the East End of Glasgow. Marking my cross in the box that said Yes to the question ‘Should Scotland be an independent country?’ felt like the culmination of a long journey.
I spent the rest of polling day in my constituency. It was the most emotional day at the polls I have ever known. I had people literally crying on my shoulder. Young people excited at the prospect of building a new nation. Older voters who had spent decades campaigning for independence with little hope or expectation that they would ever see it happen.
I also witnessed the entirely understandable resentment of some No voters, angry at having to defend something they had thought could be taken for granted. I saw the strain etched on the faces of those who still hadn’t made up their minds as they entered the polling station. I assume most of these people ultimately voted No, but I spoke to one or two who had gone in expecting to do so but couldn’t. ‘How could I say no to my own country?’ was how one woman put it.
The interaction that sticks most strongly in my mind from that day was with a man at a polling station in the Gorbals, at St Francis Primary School. He was fifty-five and told me he had never voted before in his life. He said that this was the first time he had ever felt any point to voting, the first time he had ever felt any hope in politics.
As he was leaving, he handed me a box of Lees Chocolate Teacakes, a sugar boost for me and the team, he said. A few days later, when I was helping clear out the Yes hub in my constituency, I found the empty box. I sat on the floor, holding it in my hands, thinking about that man, about the hope that had been lit within him, and which would now be extinguished. I cried my eyes out.
I got home around 9 p.m. on polling day and almost immediately began to feel really unwell. It was the start of one of the worst colds I have ever had. It was as if my body was telling me that enough was enough.
I felt so bad that I lay down on my bed and fell asleep. I woke with a start around midnight. I watched the first declarations, with an open line to party HQ. We were losing, but there was still some hope. It didn’t last long. By about 1.30 a.m., it was all over. The result in Clackmannanshire, very much a bellwether, was decisive: 56% to 44%. We had lost. The sense of deflation was instant and absolute.
I had to gather myself to go to the Glasgow count. Victory in Glasgow was bittersweet. The mammoth round of interviews I did with all the main UK and international channels was the rawest I had ever been on live TV. My heart was breaking. It was around 5 a.m. by the time I got in the car to go to Edinburgh. The hoped-for victory party was now a wake. On the journey there, I spoke to Alex. I had all but forgotten our 18 July conversation, so it was like a bolt from the blue when he told me he intended to resign later that morning. I tried to talk him out of it, an effort that would continue over bacon rolls in Bute House a few hours later, but his mind was made up.
When I arrived, there were lots of tears. John Swinney, Geoff Aberdein, Alex and his wife, Moira, and I all gathered in a meeting room, with others coming and going sporadically. At some point, Alex took a call from David Cameron. This turned out to be the only ray of sunshine in an otherwise dark night. It was obvious that Cameron was making a massive miscalculation and, instead of acknowledging the closeness of the result, and promising positive change for Scotland, he used the moment to pledge English votes for English laws. It sounded like punishment for Scotland, and we immediately saw it would give us something to work with in the throes of defeat.
Alex announced his resignation later the same day. No one had really seen it coming, but no one was all that surprised either. I spent the day wandering around like a zombie. I went to St Andrew’s House to thank the transition team. They were, metaphorically speaking, all dressed up with nowhere to go. We couldn’t have wished for a more professional and dedicated team of civil servants. They were there ready and willing to serve their country in line with the popular will.
Everyone assumed that I would succeed Alex. In that moment, though, it felt overwhelming. I felt drained and depleted. How could I possibly step up to lead a country in this state? I decided to take the weekend to make up my mind. Deep down, however, I knew that there was little, if any, serious chance of me opting not to stand. Apart from anything else, at a moment of great vulnerability, I could not leave my country or my party in the lurch. But it was more than that. Often without knowing it, I had been preparing for this moment for much of my life.
Peter and I spent Friday evening and much of Saturday at Prestonfield House Hotel with a few close friends. It was while there that we learned of the surge in SNP membership. What started as a trickle on Friday afternoon was, by Saturday lunchtime, a torrent. It became obvious that, though we had lost the referendum, a fire had been sparked in Scotland that was not ready to be extinguished. I might have been hoarse from the cold, but the country had found its voice and was not about to be silenced.
CHAPTER TWELVE
First Lady
On 24 September 2014, I announced my intention to stand for leader of the SNP and First Minister of Scotland. I was the only contender in the race to succeed Alex Salmond, but, even so, the two-month period between him announcing his resignation and stepping down seemed interminable. On 14 November 2014, the interregnum finally drew to a close, and I became the first woman in the eighty-year history of the SNP to take the helm.
As I stood at the podium at our annual conference in Perth Concert Hall, taking the applause of the delegates, I felt a mix of pride, incredulity and fear. Taking charge of the party I had joined at sixteen was a massive moment for me. I had worked incredibly hard over two decades to put myself in this position, often to the detriment of my private life and personal happiness. I felt I was entitled to feel a sense of achievement, and I did.
But I felt something else too, something much harder to express, and much less comfortable. I was about to take on one of the highest-profile and most difficult jobs in the country. I was also stepping into the shoes of a man considered to be, by friend and foe alike, a political colossus. Nerves were only to be expected, but I was also feeling a sort of dissociation; in more clichéd terms, a sort of out-of-body experience. The shy, dour, always self-doubting, frumpy girl was standing in the wings watching a confident, articulate, almost stylish version of herself bestride the stage, and wondering, ‘Who is that woman? Is she real?’ The gulf between the inner me and the version on the stage that day had never felt so wide. I think I was scared that my public persona was now so far removed from my private self that I wouldn’t be able to live up to her.
It was all mixed up in a wider worry that what had unfolded since the referendum was upside down, and back to front. The losers had become the winners and vice versa. Our opponents in the No campaign might have saved the Union, for now, but they were in the doldrums. By contrast, we were soaring. SNP membership had jumped from 25,000 on referendum day to more than 100,000 by the time I became leader. Later, the unwieldiness of this – the almost impossibly broad church that it created – would become a challenge, but in the immediate aftermath of the referendum, it felt like riding a wave. I had spent the weeks since the referendum fuelling the phenomenon, speaking to packed-out venues across the country, in a tour that would reach its dizzying peak just a week later at the Hydro, Glasgow’s biggest music arena. In the preceding few months, the Hydro had hosted megastars like Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Kylie, Ed Sheeran, Prince and Robbie Williams. Soon I would be looking out at a capacity crowd of twelve thousand people, all there to hear me speak.
It was exhilarating but also surreal. Was it the political equivalent of a dot.com bubble that would burst as quickly as it had inflated, an intoxication that would soon give way to the mother of all hangovers? I had a concern that it was unsustainable, and this doubt would only grow as the 2015 General Election drew closer. I had the sense that I was carrying something fragile, and it never went away completely.
On 19 November 2014, I was formally elected as Scotland’s fifth First Minister, the first woman to hold the office. Being the first woman to occupy Bute House was undoubtedly significant, but, by the time of my election, Holyrood had been in existence for less than two decades. Perhaps of more significance in the grand sweep of history was the accompanying function of Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland. The Seal is one of the principal symbols of Scotland, used by the monarch to authorize official documents. The continuation of a Scottish Seal was one of the guarantees for Scotland in the 1707 Treaty of Union. The first recorded Keeper of the Seal in the fourteenth century, pre-union days, was Sir Alexander de Cockburn. The first, post-union, was Hugh Campbell, the 3rd Earl of Loudon. For more than six hundred years, every Keeper of the Great Seal had been a man. In November 2014, I became the first woman to bear the title. Notwithstanding the largely symbolic nature of the role, it is a piece of history I take pride in.
The process of election in the Scottish Parliament that afternoon was relatively short. At its conclusion, Tricia Marwick, a close friend since my teenage years, and the first woman Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament, declared that I had been duly selected and that in line with the requirements of the Scotland Act she would recommend my appointment to the Queen.
The other party leaders then made short speeches of congratulations. Reading these now, I am struck by how gracious they were. Political markers were laid down in each of them, but there was none of the spite and rancour that so often characterizes discourse today. There was respect for the occasion and for the office of First Minister.
After the other leaders had spoken, I gave my acceptance speech. I pledged to be a First Minister for all of Scotland and to:
build a Scotland that all those who live and work here can be proud of – a nation both socially democratic and socially just; a Scotland confident in itself, proud of its successes and honest about its weaknesses; a Scotland of good government and civic empowerment; a Scotland vigorous and determined in its resolution to address poverty, support business, promote growth and tackle inequality.
I was acutely conscious of the significance of my gender and I expressed the hope that my election would send a ‘strong, positive message to girls and young women – indeed, to all women across our land.’
My then eight-year-old niece, Harriet, was watching, probably a bit bemused, with the rest of my family in the public gallery. Her brother, Ethan, and my other nephews, Cameron, Ross and Finlay, were alongside her. I said this about Harriet:
She does not yet know about the gender pay gap, underrepresentation or the barriers such as high childcare costs that make it so hard for so many women to work and pursue careers. My fervent hope is that she never will, and that by the time she is a young woman, she will have no need to know about any of those issues, because they will have been consigned to history.
To have a woman leading the country seemed to have touched something in the consciousness of many, as in the following days I was inundated with emails and letters from women and girls, telling me that, regardless of who I was and what my politics were, my presence as First Minister signified something important – the hope of a more equal future for them and their daughters. The weight of responsibility that I already felt became heavier. I knew there were some who, however subtly and implicitly, would try to lay any mistakes and missteps that I made at the door of women generally, proof in their eyes that we are not up to the top jobs after all.
Living up to the honour of being the first female incumbent of my office was almost an obsession, and I don’t use that word lightly. One of my early priorities was helping to achieve gender equality on public and company boards. Progress on this had been glacial throughout my time in politics. When I took office, companies were just starting to take it seriously, and only as a result of mounting evidence that those with more women on their boards were more profitable. Who could possibly have guessed that, when the top talent from half the population was no longer excluded or grossly under-represented, performance and productivity might improve?
The obsession came partly from the sense that I would inevitably be held to higher standards – or, at least, different standards – than a man in my position would be. The journalist Mary Ann Sieghart describes, in her brilliant book on the topic, a concept called ‘the authority gap’. I know it to be true not from a textbook but, like women everywhere, from the everyday experiences I have had over my lifetime.
It is unarguably the case that women have to work twice as hard to be considered half as good as men. Whereas men are presumed to be competent, to know what they are talking about, as undisputed experts in their field, unless and until it is proven otherwise, for women, it is usually the opposite: no matter the expertise or experience we have, the onus is always on us to prove our worth and it is always a work in progress.
It is a daily fact of life for women, almost regardless of our expertise or seniority, that we will be interrupted and talked over by men. Ideas and suggestions that are dismissed or ignored when we express them will be treated as epiphanies when they come out of the mouths of men.
We are judged, usually unkindly, on our appearance and the tone and timbre of our voices, in ways that men never are. The more feminine we look and sound, the less seriously we are taken. But, if we go the other way, as I tended to do in my younger years, emulating the men around us, dressing more soberly, lowering the tone of our voices, being more assertive, we will be written off as aggressive and unlikeable. Not feminine enough.
Shortly after I became First Minister, I was at an event attended by a fairly prominent Scottish businessman. He will remain nameless, partly to spare his blushes but also because I suspect the behaviour I am about to describe wasn’t even conscious on his part, though that doesn’t excuse it. On the occasion in question, he didn’t shake my hand or greet me as First Minister, as I had seen him do countless times with Alex. Instead, he stroked my upper arm and said, ‘How are you, Nicola?’
This is not me being precious because he didn’t address me as First Minister. It was being treated so differently from my male predecessor that annoyed me. As is so often the case, an anecdote that seems almost trivial in fact tells a bigger story, one that is familiar to women in every walk of life.
The days following my election as First Minister were non-stop. On the morning of 20 November, after the Royal Warrant had been signed by the Queen, I was sworn in at the Court of Session – a short but solemn occasion before a full bench of judges. It was then straight back to Parliament for my first session of First Minister’s Questions, which ranged over a wide variety of topics, such as access to cancer drugs, education and criminal justice. It was an early reminder of the weight of responsibilities I now carried.
In the afternoon I met with a group of unpaid carers in Bute House, a deliberate signal of my desire to amplify the voices of those traditionally ignored in the corridors of power. This became a source of tension throughout my time in office, as vested interests, used to having a virtual monopoly on the time and attention of political leaders, felt squeezed out. One of the constant refrains of my time as First Minister was that I was anti-business. I was not. I just happened to think that the voice of the business community was not the only one that should be heard by decision-makers. A vibrant economy generating the wealth a country needs is dependent on having thriving, successful businesses. However, it does not follow that the views businesses express on, for example, taxation and regulation, will always be right – or selfless and altruistic. Nor are they the only views that should be taken account of.
I later put the final touches to my first Cabinet, which I unveiled the following day. I had decided that Mike Russell and Kenny MacAskill should leave government. They had both been good ministers, though it seemed to me that Kenny’s Justice portfolio had become mired in problems that he was struggling to get to grips with. Moreover, I wanted to freshen things up and put my own stamp on the Cabinet, so I called them both into Bute House early Thursday evening to break the news. It was horrible. Kenny appeared to take it well, expressing the view that he felt it was time for him to take a break from government. However, I also suspect that he is one of those men who would not have enjoyed having a woman as his boss. Mike, who was Education Secretary, took it much less well. He and I had been close for years and I was and am extremely fond of him, so it took all of my resolve not to crumble in the face of his protestations.
