I am shown to the office of Nicola Sturgeon, MSP for Health and Well-Being and Deputy First Minister, ten minutes after the time I was allocated. I am also told that instead of the half an hour I was promised, I will only be allowed to speak with her for fifteen minutes. When I catch sight of her there is a slight grimace on her face, as if this interview is the last thing she wants to do, but she isn’t aware that I’ve spotted her. I’m finally introduced, and as we shake hands she’s all smiles and niceties. So far I am not finding myself endeared to this woman.
When I enter her office, I can forgive her for cutting my time short. This is a place of stress and chaos. Folders and sheets of paper lie sprawled across a desk near the window. There are chairs placed randomly around the room. I wasn’t expecting framed photographs of Sturgeon and her partner, Peter Murrel, the SNP's Chief Executive, dotted all over the place, but there’s absolutely nothing personal about this work space. Sturgeon has rushed back from a morning at Glenrothes where a by-election is being fiercely contested. She shows no signs, however, of being flustered. Her strawberry blonde hair sits perfectly, framing her subtly made-up face. Her dark brown eyes only add to her confident aura. However, when I begin to ask questions she picks at the cuticles around her fingernails. It is a nervous habit which seems unusual for a woman who surely knows the party line off by heart – Sturgeon joined the Scottish Nationalist Party at the age of just sixteen.
“I had an English teacher who was a Labour counsellor and he knew I was interested in politics. He always assumed I would join the Labour party so I suppose there was a wee bit of rebelliousness there,” she says, before quickly adding, “I would have joined the SNP anyway but that’s maybe what spurred me on at that time.” Sturgeon’s political aspirations were further fuelled by an adolescence spent in her working-class hometown of Irvine in North Ayrshire. “Thatcher was in power. I thought what she was doing to Scotland was dreadful and I didn’t think Labour was providing much of an alternative. I believe Scotland should be independent. I suppose back then maybe it was more of a romantic notion rather than based on hard facts because at 16 you don’t know much about the economy and such like.” Romantic notion or not, Sturgeon went on to leave school and study law at the University of Glasgow where she joined the SNP student wing. “I was attracted to a career in politics,” she says, “But it was never a dead cert for me so I probably back then thought I was more likely to work as a lawyer than a politician.”
On graduating she worked as a solicitor in Drumchapel before becoming an MSP and standing as the SNP candidate for the Glasgow Shettleston constituency in 1992. She lost the seat, but the election is a notable point in Sturgeon’s career; she was the youngest Parliamentary candidate in Scotland at the time, and female to boot. It is at this point that I get a rare glimpse of what Nicola Sturgeon is like beyond her title of MSP; “God that’s nearly twenty odd years ago, that’s quite depressing actually,” she quips. Seizing on this moment of candidness between us, I ask her what it is like to be a young female in the male-dominated world of politics. From her well-rounded response I get the impression this is a question she is used to being asked, and we have fallen back into the strict relationship of journalist and politician. “It can be challenging at times to be female and to be relatively young. I suppose how I handle that is just to get on with it.” She tells me, “If you do your job well then people will respect you for it regardless of what age you are or what gender you are.”
Sturgeon sites the prominent SNP member Winnie Ewing as a major influence. “She is an example of somebody who was a woman in politics when it was completely male dominated and had to suffer a lot of abuse as a result of that,” Sturgeon tells me. Indeed many political commentators have suggested that it was Ewing’s victory in the 1967 Hamilton by-election that led to the then Labour Government establishing the Kilbrandon Commission to examine the possibility of a devolved Scottish assembly.
With Ewing having fought hard for her Parliamentary positions and acting as President of the SNP until 2005, does the Deputy First Minister not find it infuriating when people, especially women, do not make use of their democratic right to vote? “People should have the right to abstain but I do believe there should be an onus on people to actually participate in the election. I get kind of frustrated when people don’t vote, women in particular. People have struggled for the vote and for our generations to take it so lightly and to treat it so carelessly does annoy me.” This response comes rapidly, and Sturgeon is in full flow. She continues without pausing for breath, “We live in a democracy and I suppose one of the ironies of democracies is that it gives you the right not to vote if you don’t want to. Should there be compulsory voting? Personally I would probably be in favour of that as long as you had that right to abstain.”
Aware that my time is nearly up, I throw in a wild card and ask what would Nicola Sturgeon MSP like to be remembered for whenever she chooses to leave the political world. “That’s a hard question actually,” she ponders for a moment before responding. “I think probably as Health Minister the thing that I hope will be a lasting legacy, not for me but of the SNP government, will be the abolition of prescription charges, restoring the NHS to its founding principle.” This is what defines Sturgeon. She is not single-minded but instead always thinking in terms of the party that she has been a member of since her youth. She goes on to tell me, “If I never do anything else in politics I will always be intensely proud of what the SNP has achieved, not only winning the election and becoming the government, but showing that with a bit of ambition and vision and determination to get things done, governments can actually be popular.”
I’m soon ushered from the room. “That was relatively painless,” she tells me, shaking my hand. And with that, Nicola Sturgeon returns to another day in the chaos of her office.
It’s only when I get home and listen back to the interview that I realise I’ve been duped. Sturgeon has a way of either skirting around questions or making you feel foolish to the point of submission. I had asked about the SNP’s plans to raise the legal age to purchase alcohol which were proposed last year. I put forward Labour leader Ian Gray’s argument that it is hypocritical to allow people of 18 to vote but not buy alcohol. “I think to try and equate those two things is silly,” she says, “I don’t think its particularly useful to use simplistic arguments in that debate. I respect other peoples views on it but I do think we’ve got to have the debate in a slightly more mature level than some of the comments I’ve heard.” It’s responses such as these that seem to suggest an underlying smugness to the Scottish Nationalist Party.
Yet why should they be smug? Alex Salmond has been accused of complaining about the powers the Scottish Parliament doesn’t have rather than making use of the ones they do. Furthermore, the party has come under fire as many believe their election manifesto offered false promises to voters. Commentators have suggested that the party’s plan to scrap student loans in favour of grants is unrealistic and so I asked how close the party is to meeting this promise. “It was a huge first step to get rid of the graduate endowment,” she says proudly, “not just in principle because it restores the principal of free education. We’re about to consult on some of the other aspects we want to do including replacing loans with grants and getting rid of the debt burden…” Wait, wasn’t that what I just asked about? Too late, Sturgeon neatly brushed around the question and powered on to talk about the “hurdles to come” and how “determined” the SNP are. In short, I have been offered up a neat sound bite for my Dictaphone while my question remains unanswered.
And it’s these unanswered questions which leave me feeling disenchanted with the Scottish Nationalist Party. I get the feeling that to her I’m just a journalism student, a fifteen minute interview that she never has to think about again because I’m not important. But Nicola Sturgeon has just lost herself a vote. The onus is on people like me to participate in the political process, and I hope that the people like me won’t fall for the SNP when election time rolls around again.
