CULTURE Fully unauthorised
Books: Andrew Hook
David Torrance
‘Nicola Sturgeon, A Political Life’, by David Torrance, Birlinn
‘How David Cameron Saved Scotland, And May Yet Save Us All’, by Owen Dudley Edwards, Luath Press
The opening sentence of chapter one of David Torrance’s biography of Nicola Sturgeon is – fortunately atypically – a poorly written one. Here it is in full: ‘For someone who was about to become First Minister of Scotland, the fifth of the devolved era and the first female holder of the post, Nicola Sturgeon looked unburdened by the enormity of the occasion’.
For someone to describe this occasion as an ‘enormity’ is surely wholly inappropriate. Okay, I’m aware that language develops, and the meaning of words can change, but the primary meaning of ‘enormity’ remains ‘something wicked or monstrous’ – and my Shorter Oxford Dictionary reminds me that the notion the word means ‘excess in magnitude’ is an incorrect usage. The author (or his editor?) should have recognised the possible problem and rewritten such a crucial sentence.
David Torrance concedes that his book has its limitations. Born in 1970, Scotland’s first minister will be only 45 this July, but with some justification Torrance argues that given her almost 30-year membership of the SNP, she has already had ‘a long career’. Nonetheless the author agrees that his book can only be an ‘interim’ biography, no more than ‘an initial distillation of the available (but frustratingly limited) sources’. Contemporary newspaper coverage, augmented by interviews and some secondary sources, is all that Torrance has to work with, and he must have felt particularly frustrated by Nicola Sturgeon’s refusal to grant him a ‘background’ interview. Thus his book, as he puts it, is ‘a fully unauthorised biography’.
Some readers may take the term ‘unauthorised’ to mean that what they are about to read will contain material – even revelations – that the book’s subject would not have wished to be made public. If so, they will be disappointed. This biography is subtitled ‘A Political Life’ – and that is exactly what it is. From beginning to end, the text locates Nicola Sturgeon exclusively in the world of politics, charting her career from adolescent SNP activist to triumphant first minister of an SNP government. Of her life outside politics we hear little or nothing. In the book’s early chapters there are snippets of information about her family, school days and teachers. She apparently was ‘a voracious reader’. As a teenager, she enjoyed ‘Sunset Song’ and the historical novels of Nigel Tranter. As an adult, the crime fiction of Ian Rankin and Christopher Brookmyre features in her bookcase beside biographies of Margaret Thatcher, Hillary and Bill Clinton, and Tony Blair. But there is absolutely nothing here to suggest that the wider cultural world in any of its forms had much to do with shaping the kind of person Nicola Sturgeon became.
Inevitably the first minister’s private or emotional life remains another closed door. We learn that before her marriage to the SNP’s chief executive Peter Murrell in 2010, she’d had close relationships with two other men, but the fact alone is all we know. Equally David Torrance makes no comment on that marriage in 2010. Might one speculate that marrying its chief executive, she was, as it were, marrying the SNP? If there is even a shred of truth in that surmise, then it could be seen as confirming the notion that Nicola Sturgeon is an archetype of the new political class much commented on today: men or women who post-university have had no career, no life, outside politics. (Sturgeon’s career as a solicitor lasted no more than two years.) Above, I seem to complain that we learn nothing from this book about Sturgeon’s life outside politics. Further thought raises the possibility that future biographers will in fact have little or nothing to add.
Given its consistent focus on Sturgeon’s political career, Torrance’s book soon becomes little more than a detailed history of the rise and rise of the SNP in Scottish politics. The perspective is that of Sturgeon, but given her active role from around 1990 on, her story is very much the story of the party itself. Anyone seeking to learn just how the SNP defined itself in the years leading up to the 2014 referendum – what issues were controversial, the tension between ‘fundamentalists’ (for whom independence was the only issue) and ‘gradualists’ (for whom devolution was the way forward) and of course the contributions of Sturgeon’s major colleagues – Alex Salmond, John Swinney, Roseanna Cunningham, Fiona Hyslop, Mike Russell and others—will enjoy Torrance’s admirably judicious and balanced account.
The movement of Sturgeon’s own career as a politician is in a sense a very familiar one. As a young activist, her stance on most issues was quite hard line. In 1999, for example, at the opening of the new Scottish parliament, she was among the MSPs who refused to swear allegiance to the Queen. With the passage of time, however, pragmatism began to displace youthful idealism. Now totally loyal to Alex Salmond, she would support such policies as the lowering of corporation tax, the freezing of council tax, membership of NATO, even the retention of the monarchy.
Torrance’s view seems to be that in recent years, and particularly in the referendum campaign, Sturgeon became a safer pair of hands than the party’s leader. While Salmond had become something of a loose cannon, he argues, it was Sturgeon who kept the Yes campaign on well-organised, firmly pragmatic rails. Torrance’s book ends several months into Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership of the SNP. One cannot help wondering what she makes of the conduct of her predecessor as his seems increasingly to become the dominant voice over the role of SNP MPs in a future hung parliament. There is a potentially explosive issue here. If one materialises, however, it will be for a future biographer to explore.
My old friend Owen Dudley Edwards’ book, while equally political, has little in common with David Torrance’s. (In fact it would be interesting to know how Owen feels about Torrance’s clear implication that the SNP and its future is more assured under Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership, given that he has apparently wholly unqualified admiration for Alex Salmond and what he has achieved.) ‘How David Cameron Saved Scotland’, as the title indicates, is a book in the tradition of whimsical political satire, witty and entertaining, but also subversive and derisory. The book’s tone throughout is not that of malevolently destructive, Swiftian satire.
The narrative voice is rather that of the long-suffering but tolerant schoolmaster, correcting the mistakes of a clever but misguided pupil. Over and over again we are reminded of how intelligent the Oxford-educated David Cameron actually is. But that intelligence simply makes the errors of his ways all the more culpable. Why in particular, asks Owen, has Cameron failed to learn the political lessons that his excellent history tutor at Oxford, Vernon Bogdanor, offered to teach him?
Owen provides the answer to that question in a series of chapters devoted to the education of a prime minister. But of course it is Owen himself, addressing Cameron, who is providing the required education. Young Cameron’s mistakes and failures are relentlessly exposed by a teacher who brings to bear on every controversial issue an extraordinary wealth of knowledge concerning nationalism and the political history of England, Scotland, Ireland and America, in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Near the end of the book, Owen characteristically admits as much: ‘And with the usual excessive optimism of the teacher I have tried to drench you in the history of these islands and some of their international contexts all the more because you have made such little obvious use of the training available to you’. ‘Drench’ indeed, and I fear that some readers at least may occasionally find themselves looking for a convenient umbrella.
For myself, I find much in the book to learn from and enjoy. But equally, for the non-nationalist, there is much with which to disagree. In a passage commenting interestingly on Sir Walter Scott, Owen (who as ever is as good on literature as he is on history) suddenly announces that ‘Alex Salmond’s laughter would have delighted him’. Really? I’m not so sure that Scott would have found the recent referendum a laughing matter. Then there is Owen’s enthusiasm for the so-called Edinburgh Agreement – which he sees as immensely to Cameron’s credit: ‘You, my dear Mr Cameron, are not the hero of this little epic to which I am subjecting you…but in one respect your conduct was most emphatically heroic and farsighted, your agreement with First Minister Alex Salmond that the Referendum should happen, should be enabled from Whitehall by you, and should take place at a date in the future of Alex Salmond’s choosing’.
Some of us take a quite a different view of this agreement. I myself have argued in these pages that Whitehall foolishly gave far too much away in subscribing to it. Another critic is Princeton University’s historian Linda Colley, and Owen is clearly worried by her comments as he refers to her more than once and tries his hardest to refute her damaging criticisms. But I remain unconvinced, believing that Owen is wrong and my fellow Princetonian right.
At bottom Owen emerges as an admirably devout optimist. He argues that Cameron’s England has nothing in common with today’s Scotland. England means a failed, warmongering foreign policy, ‘welfare drained away, education sky-rocketed out of financial reach, health watered into destructive privatisation…’ etc. etc. Scottish culture, however, has moved in a different direction – ‘because we prefer the lives and wellbeing of our people, their free health and free education, their plays and their poetry, their minds and their arts’.
Do all Scots actually agree about this, and more importantly, are the policies of Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP government all about creating this democratic utopia? My own inclination is rather to agree with David Torrance’s observation that: ‘Since the 1990s there [has] also been considerable tension between the SNP’s social justice agenda and its underlying neoliberal economic strategy premised upon the political alchemy of high spending coupled with low tax’.
Inside or outside the UK, Scotland’s future remains uncertain.
By Andrew Hook | April 2015