Scotland’s first minister is one of the most capable, if divisive, politicians of her era. Could her record-breaking reign conclude with the end of the union?
Nicola Sturgeon won’t take “no” for an answer. Standing at one end of the long table in the cabinet room at her official Edinburgh residence, Bute House, her white suit jacket is reflected in the glossy mahogany. Sturgeon is convinced that the final scene of Dirty Dancing includes a moment when Patrick Swayze leaps on to a table just like this. Two young women on her political staff disagree: Swayze was dancing down the aisle, they insist – correctly. How can she not remember this; how many times has she watched it? It’s the first rule of Scottish interaction that the more you like a person, the more you take the piss out of them. Perhaps it is the sunny afternoon or the slightly less punishing schedule of Holyrood in recess but, for now at least, Scotland’s longest-serving first minister is in a playful mood.
We are meeting two weeks after Sturgeon named the date for a second Scottish independence referendum as 19 October 2023, and revealed her plans to take the fight to the UK’s supreme court by asking judges to rule on the legality of holding the vote without Westminster’s permission. Earlier in the day, she held a press conference in the elegant first-floor drawing room, to launch the second in a series of Scottish government papers making the case for independence. Poised at the podium beneath a portrait of Robert Burns, she was on ebullient form as she condemned the Tory leadership contest’s “wholly manufactured culture war” and accused Keir Starmer of giving “the proverbial two fingers to Scotland”, an uncharacteristically coarse jibe for the usually lawyerly Sturgeon.
