Nicola Sturgeon: ‘Scotland will definitely be independent much sooner than it feels right now’

Nicola Sturgeon was born in Irvine in 1970. She joined the Scottish National Party (SNP) at the age of 16 and was elected as an MSP representing the city of Glasgow in 1999. She was elected as the first minister of Scotland on 19 November 2014, and resigned in March 2023. She is currently the MSP for Glasgow Southside constituency.

In her Letter to My Younger Self, Nicola Sturgeon reflects on her achievements in politics, looks back on the heartbreak of losing the vote for Scottish independence, and the struggles of leading the country during the Covid pandemic

My preoccupations at 16 were, I think, twofold. Firstly, passing my exams to get to university. I was really, really focused on that. But secondly, it was round about that age that I started to get really interested in politics. I was still 16 when I joined the SNP. So it was, increasingly at that age, an interest for me. I was a very, very studious kid, and I took it really seriously. One of the things I think I would tell my younger self is to just lighten up a little bit. Work hard, go after the things you want, but don’t forget to be young and enjoy yourself a bit along the way.

I was a really shy teenager. Believe it or not, given what I’ve done, I’m still quite shy. I was the teenager who would spend hours and hours and hours in my bedroom, studying. I wasn’t particularly sociable. I also had a bit of angst. I always had this sense of, if I took a night off studying, or later, if I took a night of campaigning, then everything would fall apart, I’d fail my exams. I had a bit of guilt about having fun really. So I suppose in that sense, I was a bit angst ridden.

I think the younger me would be pleasantly surprised that she had done something that public. She had ambition deep inside but always doubted whether she would overcome her shyness enough to achieve them. I think she’d be quite happy at the path her life had taken. But maybe she wouldn’t. She might question, you know, why did you not do certain other things? Why did you not have children? Why were you always so single-minded about your career? I think, although she would not have been able to contemplate it or comprehend it then, because there was no such thing back then as the first minister, my younger self would be very impressed that the fact that she had gone on to become the first woman leader of her country. But I think she would be pretty scathing about how I dress. Back then I was like, jeans, donkey jacket, Doc Martens, that kind of stuff. I think she would have looked at some of my sharp suits and stiletto heels and thought, that’s a bit pathetic. Why did you conform to all of that?

I can remember clearly the day I was elected. It was not just about me becoming a member of parliament, it was becoming a member of the first Scottish parliament in three centuries. It was a historic day, as well as a really special day for me. I remember the day I was actually sworn into parliament, thinking back to the 16-year-old girl who nervously pitched up on the doorstep [of SNP candidate Kay Ullrich] in the 1987 election, and very tentatively started to get involved. I remember thinking that she would have been a bit disbelieving about this day, but also really excited at the prospect.

I first met Alex Salmond in my late teens. By my early 20s I was quite close to him in terms of the SNP. He was definitely somebody that I looked up to. He was my political hero, and then increasingly, over my
early 20s, became a mentor, somebody that encouraged me, pushed me on, and somebody that I learned an awful lot from.

Becoming the leader of your country, the first woman to do it is a big thing. But I also remember feeling this enormous sense of responsibility and this sense of, oh my god, can I? Can I live up to this? Am I, you know, am I capable of doing this? Because I guess from right back to my teenage years, right through my life, there’s been always that what would be called imposter syndrome, that sense of am I really capable of doing these things that I’m pushing myself forward for? I remember a lot of what I said in my speech that day was about trying to use my position to make life better for younger women and girls coming after me. So it was a symbolic moment.

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I’ve made loads of mistakes on specific things. But in a bigger sense I wish I’d enjoyed it all a bit more. It passes in the blink of an eye, and I think, looking back, I was always so focused on the responsibility, the day-to-day demands of the job.  And now I look back and think, I travelled all over the world doing my job as first minister. I’ve been to so many countries, but I’ve not actually seen many of them, because I didn’t take the time to stop and have a proper look.

It would be a strange thing if I was to say I’d made no political mistakes. If I could go back I would try to find ways of being more convincing and persuasive on some of the big issues, like what currency Scotland would use, what our public finances would be like. I don’t know hand on heart whether it would have made a difference to the final outcome [to the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence], but that’s something that can’t be proved one way or the other.

The day after the referendum was the most heartbroken I’ve felt in politics. I’ve had my fair share of election defeats over the years, but I think that’s the only time I would describe myself as genuinely heartbroken. And I remember doing lots of live television interviews just as the results were coming in, and feeling like my heart was breaking live on television. I think Scotland will definitely be independent much sooner than it feels right now. I’d say within the next 10 years is a reasonable guess. You can’t be definitive. And of course, one of the nice things now is that I don’t get pushed on the precise date. 

Going through the Covid years was terrifying. It was a scary time for everybody. Just because you happen to be in the hot seat of leadership, it doesn’t mean you don’t feel the same kind of bewilderment and fear that everybody else does. But I had a responsibility just to, step by step, lead people through it, and I tried to do that in the best way I could. And one of the things I decided early on that I had to do was just be upfront with people, try to be very visible, very consistent. Tell people what we knew, what we didn’t know, how that was changing, why we were asking them to do certain things, what we were getting wrong. And that’s where the daily updates came from. And even today, there is probably rarely a day goes by when I don’t get stopped in the street by somebody saying that they found that approach comforting and important. But it helped me as well, because it gave me a kind of focus and a discipline and a bit of structure to take the decisions I was taking. It’s the toughest thing I’ve ever done.

Coping with the comments in the press is something that my 16-year-old self would think, I could never deal with that. I think partly you just get used to it, and you get a bit inured to it. And so you get to that point where it’s family and friends who get more affected by it than you do. But the danger is becoming too inured to it. In today’s world, robust scrutiny and criticism of politicians is right. It’s part of democracy. But some of the abuse and really toxic stuff that gets hurled, particularly at women in politics today, is not acceptable. There’s a danger that somebody like me just becomes so inured to it that you start to think it’s acceptable. So it’s a difficult balance to strike.

I’m not a fan of Trump in any respect. His contempt and disrespect for women can be summed up in just how he treated that journalist a couple of weeks ago, when he called her piggy. Quiet, piggy. I think that says everything you need to know. I mean, I don’t think Trump has much respect for anybody other than himself, but he has a particular attitude to women that is sexist, it’s misogynist, it’s all of these things that most of my political career I thought were in decline, and now they are back in the ascendancy.

If I could re-live one time in my life again it would be the two days over which I became first minister. I’d love to go back and slightly slow them down and just savour every moment of it, because in the moment, it’s all such a mad rush of different things. And obviously you’ve got all these swirling emotions. I’d love to go back and relive that and just take the time to let it all sink in properly.

Frankly by Nicola Sturgeon is out now (Pan Macmillan, £28).

You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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