BY IAN MITCHELL

Readers wondering in amazement that Nicola Sturgeon has again put forward a measure which she must have known was going to be knocked back by the United Kingdom government need to understand her background and political personality. Her tactics with the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, which was vetoed on Monday night by the British government, have caused surprise. To me, as her biographer, they are not surprising, as she had always been like that. Sturgeon herself admits she went into politics because of her “hatred” of Margaret Thatcher “and all she stood for”. She started on the negative and has continued on the negative. Goading the British government is all part of the “sublimated hatred” strategy which most nationalists use to lever themselves into power.

She had not always been like that. With time, she has become better at pretending to be constructive when she is plotting another conflict with the British government. I say this having spent a long time researching her past in parliament. I have written a biography of Sturgeon which largely ignores her interactions with the media, as they change from day to day, but instead concentrates on what she said in the Holyrood chamber as recorded in the Official Report. That is where her most considered statements are presumably made.

At the start, when she was in parliament but not in government, from 1999 to 2007, she was able to speak more freely than later when she had the responsibilities of office to consider. Then, she made very few statements that could be considered explicitly feminist in today’s context.

Iain Macwhirter noted in The Herald that she appeared “slightly mannish”, and she certainly did not affect that stylish, hyper-bourgeois look that she currently prefers—always with very high heels, usually red for some reason, like her lipstick. She had been involved in “women’s issues” while at university, but once elected made no more of that than any conventionally-minded gender egalitarian at the time. Using Cold War terminology, she was more a “fellow traveller” than a dedicated, card-carrying “womenist” in her early days.

This changed after she took power in 2015, following the resignation of Alex Salmond. Perhaps Salmond himself played a part in that – we do not know. From then on, she seemed to “immature with age”, rather as Harold Wilson famously said Tony Benn did. The reason for this seems to me to have been political.

It was a good way to unsettle what was settled in British politics, hopefully to the ultimate benefit of the Scottish nationalists.

I am sure Sturgeon gave very close consideration to a possible veto of the Gender Recognition Bill before deciding to force it through the Holyrood parliament. Unless she was uncharacteristically poorly advised, she would have known that it was likely to be vetoed by Westminster. Yet she forced the Bill through in the face of one Ministerial resignation, that of Ash Regan MSP, and in a great hurry before her Finance Minister, Kate Forbes, came back from maternity leave this year. Ms Forbes is a member of the Free Church of Scotland and has been a consistent opponent of extreme feminist politics. Yes Sturgeon pushed ahead – why? In my view, in order to create conflict with Westminster.

The Supreme Court ruling against the “advisory referendum” proposal three months ago gave the independence movement a boost in the polls. I suspect Alister Jack’s veto of the gender Recognition Bill will do the same. I do not believe Sturgeon is as serious about the gender aspects of this Bill as she is about the opportunities for another constitutional “stooshie” (good Scottish word for an overblown but essentially trivial quarrel). After all, as I note many times in my book, Sturgeon spent eight years in opposition railing against “the unfair Council tax”, yet when she got into power, she immediately forgot all about the injustice of that measure, which still operates much as it did in 2007.

I suspect that that Gender Recognition Bill is of a piece with that – a form of political advertising paid for by the British subsidy for the Holyrood parliament. Expect the maximum amount of whining about the situation, and the minimum amount of actual effort being put into righting the real injustices which afflict female members of Scottish society (despite fifteen years of SNP government). This is politics, red in tooth and claw, and Sturgeon is obsessively political—red in lip and heel.

Users of Amazon can read the full background in “Nicola Sturgeon: A Citizen’s Biography of a Driven Woman in a Drifting Parliament” by Ian Mitchell – published last week. You can get more details here. Ian Mitchell is also the author of The Justice Factory: Can the Rule of Law Survive in 21st Century Scotland? (2020) The Foreword is written by Lord Hope of Craighead, ex-Deputy President of the UK Supreme Court and Alan Page, Professor of Public Law at Dundee, who is the author “Constitutional Law of Scotland”, the main reference work, has written an Introduction to Part II. Details of the book are here.