Nicola Sturgeon turns interviewer to question journalist

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon yesterday turned the tables on a leading journalist in a wide-ranging interview that touched on subjects including inequality and US president Donald Trump.

Nicola Sturgeon questioned leading journalist Tina Brown. Picture: Fraser Bremner

In a role reversal, Ms Sturgeon sat in the interviewer’s chair to question Tina Brown, a former editor of major US magazines including Vanity Fair and Tatler.

The event at the Beyond Borders International Festival in Innerleithen took place just four months after Ms Sturgeon was quizzed by Ms Brown at the Women in the World summit in New York.

At that event, Ms Sturgeon spoke out against sexist attitudes which “reduce women to body parts or to what they wear or what their hair looks”, a theme the two women returned to yesterday.

Ms Brown said she found that, in the workplace, “women only get the big jobs when everyone else has failed”.

The veteran journalist, who was born in Britain and wrote a best-selling biography of Diana, Princess of Wales, also poured criticism on the US president, describing him as “someone who doesn’t know anything about anything”.

During her visit to the event, held at Traquair House, Ms Sturgeon also met recipients of the Women in Conflict ­fellowship programme, a Scottish Government-funded initiative which helps to train women from war-torn countries in peacekeeping.

It was the second festival appearance of the weekend for Ms Sturgeon, who on Saturday in Edinburgh spoke about the treatment of Hillary Clinton during last year’s US presidential election campaign.

In a conversation with the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Ms Sturgeon said she felt “rage” at how the Democratic candidate was dealt with simply because she was a woman.

Ms Ngozi Adichie said she felt “rage” reading an article about Mrs Clinton that said she was too serious. Ms Ngozi Adichie added: “That standards are not the same and if the standards are not the same we don’t have justice.”

Ms Sturgeon replied: “I felt myself feeling that same rage watching the American election and watching how Hillary Clinton was treated.

“You still hear people saying it wasn’t because she is a woman and, of course, not everything was because she was a woman, but watching it from afar so many of the judgments made were absolutely because she was a woman.”

The SNP leader said she found it “quite difficult to understand” how the US elected Mr Trump after electing its first black president.

During the interview with the writer of the Orange Prize winning Half a Yellow Sun, the First Minister also said she was upset earlier in her political career over criticism for not smiling.

She said: “When I was a younger woman in politics what was very often said about me, and I used to get upset because I didn’t think it was true, was that I didn’t smile.

“You would never hear that about a man in politics and things in men that are seen as leadership and assertiveness – in a woman you are ‘bossy’ and ‘strident’.”