Nicola Sturgeon 'detests' Tories. She might as well go full Vladimir Putin and call us traitors – John McLellan

In politics and higher education, harsh critics of The Sun and Daily Mail are not hard to find, and usually from people who don’t read them.

Nicola Sturgeon said: "I detest the Tories and everything they stand for." (Picture: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

“I hate the Sun and the Mail,” they say, and indignation always follows my response; “It’s not the papers you hate, it’s their readers”.

Similarly, our First Minister, who claims to be First Minister for us all, would I’m sure angrily refute any suggestion she detests 15 per cent of the Scottish population.

And sure enough, after her unqualified response to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday, that “I detest the Tories and everything they stand for”, there she was insisting it wasn’t Tory voters she detested but Tory policies. Too late.

There is no other way to interpret her words because that 15 per cent, the current level of Conservative support according to the latest Panelbase poll for the Sunday Times, represents those committed to the party’s principles regardless of national fortunes, or the performance of whoever happens to be leader.

Those who said on the doorsteps in 2017 that they weren’t Tories but liked Ruth Davidson have gone. So too have those Labour-voting unionists who gave up on an extreme left-wing party led by someone who embraced the United Kingdom’s enemies been given reason to return. It still leaves some 600,000 Scottish people, committed Conservative voters, who Nicola Sturgeon said she actively detested.

In case there was any misunderstanding, Culture Secretary Angus Robertson backed her up with his ambition of making Scotland “a Tory-free country”. Like others who have called for Tories to be driven out, it’s no use claiming it just means a resounding election defeat.

“I detest the Tories and everything they stand for” includes long-serving councillors who help their constituents no matter their voting preferences, community council volunteers, ladies who organise lunch clubs, and all the others bound together by a world view they are as entitled to hold as Nicola Sturgeon is to reject.

Nor can Sunday’s outburst be dismissed as a momentary slip, given her failure to condemn independence supporters’ abuse of Conservative members attending the Perth leadership hustings in August, reserving her criticism for those who attacked BBC reporter James Cook. Only SNP Commons leader Ian Blackford displayed some sense of decorum.

Plenty on her own side are free-marketeers seeking independence because they think the UK holds back Scotland’s natural buccaneering spirit, so what has brought her to this place where a clear loathing for the occupants of Downing Street can produce such a Putin-esque expression of untrammelled hatred for a significant section of the Scottish population?

Is it the lashing out of someone used to getting her own way who has backed herself into a corner from which the escape routes are diminishing by the day, and who probably realises she has jumped the gun?

If, as is widely expected after this week’s hearings, the Supreme Court rules the Scottish Parliament has no power to hold a legal independence referendum, Ms Sturgeon has already laid out her plan for the next General Election to be a “de facto” independence vote, which will rely on independence-supporting parties getting just over 50 per cent of the vote.

Apart from the obvious fact it wouldn’t change the law, even after the last fortnight’s chaos the polls indicate the goal is no nearer, and a Conservative wipe-out is not her criteria.

If Westminster in-fighting doesn’t stop, the chances of a Labour victory will grow by the day, providing Scottish floating voters with a reason to give Sir Keir Starmer a go.

This is where it should get interesting for the SNP. The minimum challenge facing the incoming UK government in 2024 will be getting the economy on an even keel, and a Labour administration will face very real problems in managing expectations that it can maintain economic growth while controlling public spending through reform and meeting the demands of its vested interests.

Expenditure will go up, so too will inflation, and there will be pressure to raise taxes, which will hamper growth. The mini-budget aftermath could just be an amuse bouche.

Labour has neither the leadership of a fresh Tony Blair “Bambi” figure, nor the benefit of the solid Tory-built economic platform he inherited in 1997, so this could be more like 1974, when Labour took over after the Heath years of power cuts, the three-day week and the failed 1972 “Dash for Growth” budget, about which we have heard so much recently.

So, let’s look forward to the next election, likely to be 2029, and the 50th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s triumph after Labour proved that things could indeed get much worse. We could have had years of chaos in which Labour goes through the same turmoil as the Conservative Party is enduring now, and across the UK voters once again turn blue.

The SNP could then mount a campaign based on Labour failure and good-old Tory-hating, but having put all her independence eggs in the next election’s basket, and having fanned rumours about her future beyond politics, the cudgels will almost certainly be taken up by someone else.

And if there is a charismatic nationalist leader-in-waiting, they were keeping a very low profile at this week’s SNP conference. Even if such a messiah exists, the promised land would be one with a Heath Robinson currency, crushing taxation, low growth to support failing public services, capital flight, hard borders and runaway inflation. And all without an established central bank to mount a bankruptcy rescue mission.

This is what Scottish Conservatives are opposing, and while Ms Sturgeon was perfectly civil on the only occasion we have met, I now know for sure that, having been a Conservative councillor, Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of the country of my birth and where I brought up my children, detests all I and my colleagues stand for.

Like so many of her rank and file, she might as well call us Quislings.