Frankly, p.28
Frankly, page 28
The drama died down reasonably quickly and, thankfully, hearts were healed. Shona and Stewart separated. Shona is happy. Stewart got married to Serena, the woman he had the affair with. She later became an SNP councillor. Angus continued to be a colourful character.
However, this was not how I had expected to spend the first few days of our third term in government.
Just a month later, UK politics was shaken to its core. It was Thursday, 17 June, and I was hosting a lunch in the Scottish Parliament restaurant when one of my Private Secretaries appeared. He handed me a note with the awful news that an MP in England had been attacked at a constituency surgery and was in a critical condition. Later that afternoon, it was confirmed that Jo Cox MP, the mother of two small children, had died from her injuries. I was in SNP HQ recording a pro-EU campaign message for the Brexit referendum, by now just a week away, when the news came through. Everyone in the room was crying.
I never met Jo, but for me and for every politician who, week in and week out, sits in community centres and church halls, with doors open to any constituent who chooses to walk through them, her murder felt personal. It also profoundly elevated my sense of unease, brewing for some time, that politics was now so toxic that it had become, at its most extreme, an unsafe environment.
Obviously, what happened to Jo was not because she was a woman. The dreadful murder, in similar circumstances, of the Conservative MP David Amess just a few years later proved that. But there is no doubt that women and minorities bear the biggest brunt of the nastier side of politics. At its most ‘mild’, it takes the form of horrible online abuse, which is bad enough. But Jo’s murder was a reality check that the impact on politicians can be much more terrifying. Of course, it is easier to identify the causes of the problem, principally the radicalizing and polarizing impact of social media, than it is the solutions. However, unless we find a way of reversing the trend, I fear that it will become increasingly difficult to entice women into politics at all.
The day after Jo Cox was killed, I hosted the British–Irish Council summit in Glasgow. This was the first time Arlene Foster of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) had attended, as First Minister of Northern Ireland. The deputy First Minister, Martin McGuinness, was also there. There was, understandably, a sombre atmosphere surrounding our discussions that day. However, I remember being very conscious of two things about the Northern Ireland delegation. First, that while Martin and Arlene were as appalled and upset by Jo’s murder as the rest of us, there didn’t seem to be the same sense of utter shock, bewilderment, numbness – an absence that was perhaps derived from living, for as long as they had, with political violence as a daily reality.
Secondly, having witnessed Martin’s interactions with Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson, I was struck by the lack of any warmth between him and Arlene. In its place was a simmering tension. I was reluctant to automatically assume that Arlene was to blame. Northern Ireland society is just as macho as Scotland’s, so I entertained the possibility that there was a gender issue at play. But, still, Martin had managed to build and maintain solid relationships with two Unionist First Ministers in the past. Arlene was the factor that had changed. I would later learn from my own experience how difficult it was to establish any rapport with her.
I remember leaving the summit fearing that the Northern Irish Executive was on shaky ground. And this was before the disaster of Brexit made matters significantly worse.
Back in February, David Cameron had named the date for the vote as 23 June 2016. The following day, Boris Johnson declared his support for Leave. It seemed that he was picking the side he thought would serve his interests best. The stage was set for an almighty battle over the UK’s place in the world.
I wasn’t worried about the likely outcome in Scotland. I had no doubt in my mind that we would vote to stay in the EU. There was certainly a strand of Euroscepticism in the country, mainly in fishing and farming communities, where frustration with the Common Fisheries and Common Agricultural policies was both acute and understandable. There was also a minority of people whose hostility to immigration fuelled an antipathy to the EU, and to free movement in particular. For some others, support for continued membership was based on a functional assessment of benefits outweighing downsides, more than it was on any strong affection for the EU itself. However, it was also true that many Scottish people did, and do, have a deeply emotional commitment to European identity. It is telling that UKIP never established any significant foothold in Scotland.
I was much less certain about the outcome south of the border, though still reasonably confident that it would turn out OK. Even when I became much more anxious, with a couple of weeks to go, I thought, on balance, that Remain would prevail. However, for all that I was, both emotionally and intellectually, very strongly in favour of staying in the EU, I found the campaign difficult and, at times, deeply uncomfortable.
Even though I swung both the SNP and the Scottish government firmly behind the case for continued membership, I felt a tension with the wider UK Remain campaign. There seemed to be a suspicion that I secretly wanted Leave to win on the strength of English votes, as this would satisfy one of my ‘conditions’ for a second independence referendum. I resented this, as it was not remotely true. The idea of losing EU membership horrified me. Also, at that time, I was more worried than enthusiastic about the prospect of a hasty re-run of the independence vote. Much as I wanted Scotland to be independent, I did not believe that a headlong rush to another vote would be good for either the country or the independence cause.
While I resented the doubts about my motives, there was one issue on which I stupidly gave them credence. I was becoming increasingly worried about the negative, fear-mongering tone of the Remain campaign. It reminded me of Project Fear in the independence campaign and I did not want to see Remain make the same mistake now. But instead of just communicating these concerns privately as I should have done, I spoke out publicly in a speech to the Resolution Foundation in late February and then again, in May, when the Treasury published a report on the dire economic impact of Brexit. It wasn’t that I didn’t share the Treasury concern, but I had seen in 2014 how badly these ‘establishment’ warnings could backfire. However, the coverage of both these interventions made it seem that I was attacking the pro-EU side. I don’t blame the Remain campaign for being aggrieved with me.
Less fair, though, were the low-level mutterings that I wasn’t pulling my weight in the campaign. There seemed to be a view that I should be doing more to influence the vote in England. The fact that I wasn’t was taken as evidence that I secretly wanted Leave to win. In fact, it was the opposite. If I was keeping a low profile, it was because I feared I would be a liability to the pro-EU side. I thought it would suit Leave down to the ground if I appeared to be lecturing voters in England. I know I am a Marmite figure south of the border. I also knew that to some ears my arguments against Brexit sounded illogical and hypocritical when set against my arguments for independence.
There is nothing intrinsically inconsistent between support for Scottish independence and support for EU membership. The EU is comprised of independent countries. I was perfectly comfortable making the positive case for international and supranational co-operation, for the pooling of sovereignty for the greater good and in our national interest. I am certain that an independent Scotland would work on that basis with the other countries of the UK, as well as in the EU, NATO and a range of other international forums.
My problem was that to many people, it simply didn’t sound credible for the person who claimed that Scotland could easily extricate herself from a 300-year-old union, to argue that the UK couldn’t do likewise from a much looser partnership of just forty years. Likewise, if I started banging on about the risks and costs of Brexit, however much I believed them to be true, it would sound as if I was indulging in Project Fear tactics.
My concerns came to a head when I was asked by ITV to be part of the three-person Remain team for its big debate on 9 June, two weeks before the poll. The Leave team was to be headlined by Boris Johnson. I could see why ITV wanted a showdown between Boris and me, but I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. There was heavy pressure for me to do it, from both ITV and the Remain campaign. My own advisers wanted me to do it too. But I was genuinely worried that I would do more harm than good. Even after agreeing in principle to take part, I was still mulling the possibility of pulling out. Perhaps unexpectedly, it was the Prime Minister who finally persuaded me to take part.
David Cameron and I were both in Orkney on 31 May for a service to mark the centenary of the First World War Battle of Jutland. As we waited in a council building corridor before moving across the road to Kirkwall’s magnificent St Magnus Cathedral, we had a quick private chat about Brexit. He said he was pleased to hear I was doing the ITV debate. When I told him I had reservations, he encouraged me to put them aside, saying that he thought it was important to have political diversity in the Remain campaign. He also thought my debating skills and experience would be valuable. He said he was growing more confident, though not complacent, that Remain would win. After our conversation, I felt that pulling out wasn’t an option. I had to step up and play my part.
And so I travelled down to London after First Minister’s Questions on 9 June. There was behind the scenes sniping about my failure to go down earlier for a rehearsal with the other team members, Amber Rudd of the Tories and Labour’s Angela Eagle. The suggestion seemed to be that it showed a lack of commitment. It really didn’t. It was simply that I was the First Minister, with responsibilities in Parliament.
It was clear when I arrived at the studios that some in the Remain camp were nervous about what I might say. Would I repeat my Project Fear attack or bang on too much about independence? I tried to put minds at rest, to reassure that I was there to help the pro-EU cause not hinder it. However, I was irritated and wondered why they had been so keen for me to take part if they were worried about what I might say. I had agreed to meet Craig Oliver, David Cameron’s Number 10 head of communications, an hour or so before going on air, so that we could talk through the format. It was obvious that he didn’t share his boss’s enthusiasm about me taking part. By this stage of my career, I had done more TV debates than Mr Oliver had enjoyed hot dinners, but that didn’t stop him tediously mansplaining it all to me.
By the time I was gathering my thoughts in the green room before going on air, my confidence was low. The people who had persuaded me to take part, against my own better judgement, were now exuding the same anxiety that had made me reluctant in the first place. I had a terrible sense of foreboding that it was going to be a disaster.
In the end, it wasn’t a disaster, but it wasn’t my best debate performance either. I tried to concentrate as much as I could on the positive arguments for staying in the EU. I pressed the point, which I thought hadn’t been made nearly strongly enough so far, about the EU’s role in maintaining peace on the continent for the past sixty years. I had a go at Boris for the lie on the side of the bus. And I tried to steer clear of the arguments I feared would make me sound like a hypocrite. Amber and Angela performed well. Angela skewered Boris on the NHS funding deceit. Amber came up with the best line of all, describing Boris as the kind of guy women were all too familiar with – the life and soul of the party, but not someone we’d want driving us home at the end of the night. It struck, pretty effectively I thought, at the issue of trust and integrity.
Boris was his usual bluff and bluster, which is not to write off his performance. On the contrary, it was clear that his style and approach had plenty of admirers. It is worth noting, though, just for the record, that a woman would never get away with his chaotic approach to politics. The lack of detail, stuttering incoherence and dishevelled appearance would herald any woman’s downfall, as it should have done for him.
The others on the Leave side were the Tories’ Andrea Leadsom and Labour’s Gisela Stuart. Of the two, I thought Andrea was the stronger performer. Actually, she was the best of the three, in my view – solid, quite down to earth, though rabidly right-wing. Gisela suffered, albeit for different reasons, from what had worried me. She sounded disingenuous. She was supposedly a lifelong socialist, but here she was enthusiastically sharing a platform with politicians whose support for Brexit, however much they tried to deny it, was all about a de-regulatory race to the bottom on workers’ and environmental rights.
What struck me most, though, and worried me greatly, wasn’t any of the individual performances. It was the contrast in demeanour between the two sides. There was a lot of nervous tension on our side, but only swagger and confidence on theirs. It might just have been arrogance, or the fact that their simplistic, dishonest arguments were easier to make than our more complex, serious ones, but I remember thinking, for the first time, that they might just be winning.
The result was a body-blow. Scotland, as I had expected, voted overwhelmingly to remain – 63% versus 37% in favour of leaving, with every local authority area recording a pro-EU vote. It didn’t matter, though. The 52%/48% leave vote UK-wide meant we would be ripped out of the EU against our will.
I spent most of the night in SNP HQ, tracking the results, before heading back to Bute House around 6 a.m. A team of tired and shell-shocked officials and advisers was waiting on me. We gathered in the Cabinet room to discuss the content of the speech that I would make later that morning. Breakfast consisted of coffee and Tunnocks caramel wafers.
My team made various suggestions which I noted down, but then I locked myself away in my study on the top floor of Bute House to craft what I wanted to say. At such an enormously significant moment, there was never any question of me asking someone else to draft a speech on my behalf. It had to come from my own head and heart.
The speech flowed more easily than it should have done, given I’d had no sleep and kept being interrupted by my Private Office patching calls through to me. Over the early part of the morning, I spoke to the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, about the steps he was taking to try to calm the markets, and to the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, about how we might join forces to make sure the voices of Scotland and London, which had also voted to remain, would be heard in the negotiations to come.
I also spoke with the Scottish Labour leader, Kezia Dugdale. In the course of a call that would later feature in a 2017 General Election TV debate (thanks to a stupid split-second decision of mine), she seemed to indicate that her view on independence might be open to change in the wake of the Brexit vote; that it might be time for Scottish Labour to drop its opposition to a second referendum. I spoke to the leaders of the other parties later that day too, but none of them stunned me like Kez had.
Kezia’s curveball aside, my most significant conversation of the morning was with David Cameron. He called me just minutes before stepping out onto Downing Street to announce his resignation. He seemed emotional, which was hardly surprising given the circumstances. He said that the referendum had been his call and, since he had failed to deliver the right outcome, the only honourable course for him was to step down; and that, in any event, he wasn’t the right person to lead the UK through the exit negotiation as his heart wouldn’t be in it. He was gracious about the contribution he thought I had made to the Remain campaign, saying that the vote in Scotland showed the SNP had done our job in a way he hadn’t managed in England. He promised that for his remaining time in Downing Street, which at that point he assumed would be a few months, he would do all he could to make sure Scotland was properly represented in the negotiation process.
I told him that my job now, as far as I was concerned, was to do everything possible to ensure that Scotland’s democratic choice was respected. I also wished him well. Although he and I agreed on little, and vehemently disagreed on a great deal, the relationship I had with him was cordial and constructive. The last conversation we had during his premiership would be on 10 July, in the Royal Box at Wimbledon. We were both there as guests of the All England Club for the men’s singles final, me with Peter, David with his mum, and got to enjoy the privilege of watching Andy Murray lift the trophy for the second time.
David and I had a brief chat after the match, taking care to stay out of earshot of Prince William and Kate. He was expecting to be Prime Minister until around September, when the Tory leadership contest between Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom was due to conclude. He was talking about the things he still wanted to do. We had no idea that Leadsom would pull out of the race the following day, and that in less than a week he would be out of Downing Street and Theresa May would have his job. Politics can be brutal.
Back, though, to 24 June, the day after the calamity of the Brexit vote. I made my speech sometime late morning. Amid the sense of turmoil and panic that was gripping the country, and what seemed to be a complete lack of any visible leadership at UK level, I knew it was important to strike a note of reassurance. The prospect of serious economic instability was real, and while I had limited ability to do anything concrete about it, I tried to sound a note of calm, to communicate a sense that, in Scotland at least, there was a steady hand on the tiller.
It was also important to reach out to citizens of other EU countries living in Scotland. At our early morning discussion, Ken Thomson, a senior civil servant, had been the first to make the point that many people who had come to live in Scotland from elsewhere in Europe would also be feeling deeply insecure, possibly even unwelcome. Again, frustratingly, there was little I could do to change the reality for them. As things stood, it would be the UK government that decided the immigration rules to replace free movement, but I desperately wanted to offer some empathy, find words that might make them, on a bleak day, feel a bit better. What I said was short and to the point, but heartfelt and, I hoped, comforting:
