Nicola Sturgeon vs Boris Johnson: Two memoirs and two unreliable narrators
Nicola Sturgeon’s Frankly and Boris Johnson’s Unleashed have some similarities
Maybe it was only to be expected of someone credited with being the best political communicator of her generation, but you’ve got to hand it to Nicola Sturgeon and the publicists at Macmillan behind her memoir Frankly. Her occupation of the Scottish news headlines since the end of last week has been total.
“A triumph. Frankly is the most insightful and stylishly open memoir by a politician since Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father,” said star Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan in the blurb for advance orders on Amazon (hard-cover £20.77). Didn’t read that, but I liked Mayflies, so I’ll take his word for it.
The drip-drip of lines in The Times serialisation, the extra tit-bits and a few tears in her interview with ITV’s Julie Etchingham and a characteristically combative interview on Radio 4’s Today programme have kept the Sturgeon bandwagon rolling, as she happily prepares the ground for the next chapter of her life, perhaps with some international organisation like Unicef, wringing out the sympathy from every episode at every opportunity.
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Straightening their records
Not having privileged access to a freebie advance review copy or having time to nip down to Waterstones – where it was on sale with £6 knocked off three days ahead of official publication – before this column’s deadline, my take on Ms Sturgeon’s recollections is reliant on those extracts and interviews, and so much of it has been copied and posted that maybe I needn’t bother with the book itself.
But as a historic document perhaps I should, and it can sit on my bookshelf next to Unleashed, Boris Johnson’s account of his rise and fall from Number 10, a similar exercise in record straightening, for want of a better phrase.
I have no idea if Andrew O’Hagan has read Unleashed and therefore puts it behind Frankly in the league table of political revisionism, but while styles clearly differ, both must be unreliable narrators of their own stories, just as I’m not best qualified to be an unbiased judge of Ms Sturgeon’s work. But with such a polarising figure, who is?
As The Salt Path controversy gloriously illustrated, first-person accounts aren’t necessarily the most reliable. A reviewer of Unleashed in the left-of-centre New Statesman magazine explained: “Maybe it is a feature of memoirs, but large chunks of this one feels like the version of Boris Johnson’s time in office he wishes were true. Or perhaps he genuinely believes it to be true.” This must surely apply equally to Ms Sturgeon’s recollections.
‘I must have blocked it out’
It stretches credibility to beyond breaking point that, as Ms Sturgeon told Julie Etchingham, she has little memory of what happened or how she felt when the police arrived at her door to turn the place over as part of the investigation into alleged embezzlement of SNP funds.
We know she did nothing wrong because she will not face any charges, so would a normal person in the same situation not have remembered something of how it felt to be an innocent person whose life was upended in an instant? The “I must have blocked it out or something” explanation for her amnesia, at one of the most dramatic moments in her life, seems rather similar to the evidence she gave to the parliamentary probe into her office’s involvement or otherwise with the initial complaints against Alex Salmond.
It also seems spiteful, and unchallengeable because he is dead, to claim Mr Salmond didn’t read the independence white paper before publication in 2013, instead heading off on a trade trip to China. Maybe he read the detail on the plane? Who knows?
At least we have confirmation that the “most detailed” preparation for a new country was anything but, which anyone with half a brain, including nationalists, knew at the time. What does that say for the recent independence papers she commissioned, which were worse?
The Press corps too is a target for a disgraceful hatchet job, claiming men in the Scottish press hushed up allegations of inappropriate behaviour against a political reporter, when Ms Sturgeon should have known the journalist was dismissed after his editor, a man, was informed.
‘Memoir of a clown’
Just as Mr Johnson remained befuddled as to why Partygate became such a big deal, apart from the desire of a lot of Tory MPs to do him in, Ms Sturgeon cannot understand why the Gender Recognition Reform Bill became such a defining and damaging issue, in which she believes resolutely to be in the right, perhaps because, as she has now told the world, she regards her sexuality as not being “binary”.
The Johnson book was so widely panned as being “the memoir of a clown”, as The Guardian described it, and was relatively light on revelation and heavy on entertainment value, that I don’t recall its publication last October being accompanied by anything like the same media frenzy as Frankly, but then again Scotland is a small country and it’s August with not a lot else going on, and Unleashed was released for the UK political conference season when the news agenda is usually packed.
The timing is instructive. Ms Sturgeon does genuinely seem to be looking forward to new life – and isn’t it fun that the Queen of Separatism apparently loves London, and chose The Times of London to serialise her book. But it’s clear from Unleashed that return is very much on Mr Johnson’s mind, and according to a recent Conservative Home survey, it’s a hope shared by a quarter of 2024 Conservative voters.
But back to that New Statesman review of Mr Johnson’s magnum opus, as he might put it. Who could that perceptive writer have been? Why Nicola Sturgeon of course. Hasta la vista, baby.
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