From being interviewed under caution as part of Operation Branchform, to leading a failed bid for Scottish independence, Nicola Sturgeon’s time in office – and the years after it – were far from ordinary.
In her long-awaited memoir, Frankly, the former Scottish first minister details how it felt to have police raid the home she shared with her ex-husband Peter Murrell, as well as shedding light on her relationship with her predecessor Alex Salmond and the row over trans rights that dominated her final months in the job.
Here, The Independent looks at the key takeaways from Ms Sturgeon’s explosive memoir.
‘Utter disbelief’ when police raided her home
The former SNP leader has outlined her overwhelming emotions when her home became the subject of a police raid over a probe into the SNP’s finances that culminated in the arrest of her then-husband in April 2024. She said she felt “utter disbelief” when the raid took place.
“With police tents all around it, it looked more like a murder scene than the place of safety it had always been for me. I was devastated, mortified, confused and terrified”, she wrote.
The weeks that followed, Ms Sturgeon said, felt like she had “fallen into the plot of a dystopian novel”.
She also said her arrest, which took place two months later, was “the worst day” of her life and described it as an experience she is “not sure [she] will ever get over”. Ms Sturgeon was later exonerated, but her ex-husband has been charged with embezzlement.
The trans row that dominated her final months in office
Ms Sturgeon also used her memoir to shed light on the division over trans rights that dominated her final months in office, something she described as being a time of “rancour and division”.
While she accepts that many have legitimate concerns about women’s spaces, she argued the debate has been “hijacked by voices on the far right”.
“The inconvenient truth”, she argues, is that “many of the most vocal deriders of trans rights, when the surface is scratched, turn out to be raging homophobes too. Some are also racists. And ironically… more than a few are also deeply misogynist.”
But the ex-SNP leader also admitted to having regrets about how she went about trying to legislate to make it easier for people to change gender, weighing up whether or not she should have “hit the pause button” when she realised how polarised the debate had become to try and reach a consensus.
While she still argues in favour of gender identification, she said that with hindsight, she wishes she had aimed for more of a consensus on the issue.
Ms Sturgeon also criticised JK Rowling, one of her biggest critics on gender rights, after a picture of the Harry Potter author wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Nicola Sturgeon, destroyer of women’s rights” resulted in her receiving a barrage of abuse.
She said: “It was deeply ironic that those who subjected me to this level of hatred and misogynistic abuse often claimed to be doing so in the interests of women’s safety.”
Pandemic still brings up a ‘torrent of emotion’
Laying bare the challenges of leading Scotland during the pandemic, the former first minister said it was “almost indescribably” hard and “took a heavy toll, physically and mentally” – finding herself sleeping just three or four hours a night over the first lockdown.
She also said she came “perilously close to a breakdown” around the time of her appearance in front of the Covid-19 inquiry, saying she will be forever haunted by fears that going into lockdown earlier could have saved more lives.
Speaking about when she broke down in tears while giving evidence, Ms Sturgeon wrote: “For the first time in my life, I sought professional help. It took several counselling sessions before I was able to pull myself back from the brink.”
Rumours about an affair with a French diplomat
Ms Sturgeon’s book also saw her address what she said were “wild stories” about her having a lesbian affair with a French diplomat, saying the speculation was rooted in homophobia.
“For many of those peddling it, ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ are meant as insults. There was naked bigotry behind the attempted smearing of me that deeply disturbs me, because of what it says about the prejudice still prevalent in our society.”
The politician also said she had never seen her sexuality as being binary.
“Long-term relationships with men have accounted for more than thirty years of my life, but I have never considered sexuality, my own included, to be binary. Moreover, sexual relationships should be private matters.”
Alex Salmond and the independence white paper
Ms Sturgeon suggests that Alex Salmond, her predecessor as first minister and former mentor, did not do his share of the heavy lifting ahead of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, accusing him of having failed to read the white paper on independence.
She recalls being left in charge of drafting the paper, which she said left her “overcome by a feeling of sheer impossibility” and “utter despair”.
“I ended up on the floor of my home office, crying and struggling to breathe. It was definitely some kind of panic attack”, Ms Sturgeon wrote.
She later said Mr Salmond showed “little interest in the detail” of the document, adding: “He promised he would read it on the plane. I knew his good intention would not survive contact with the first glass of in-flight champagne.”
‘Witch-hunt’ MSPs investigating Sturgeon ‘were directed by Salmond’
Ms Sturgeon said she believes some MSPs who investigated the Scottish government’s handling of sexual harassment allegations against Alex Salmond were “taking direction” from him.
She wrote that she thought either Mr Salmond or his allies were guiding some opposition MSPs on what to ask her, accusing her opponents in the special Holyrood committee of a “witch-hunt” against her.
The committee ultimately found Ms Sturgeon misled the Scottish Parliament over the Salmond inquiry.
However, she said the probe that “really mattered” was the independent investigation by senior Irish lawyer James Hamilton, which cleared her of breaking the ministerial code.
“From day one, it seemed clear that some of the opposition members of the committee were much less interested in establishing facts, or making sure lessons were learned, than they were in finding some way to blame it all on me”, she wrote.
“I was told, and I believe it to be true, that some of the opposition MSPs were taking direction from Alex himself – though possibly through an intermediary – on the points to pursue and the questions to ask.”
Ms Sturgeon also said her infamous falling out with her predecessor was a “bruising episode” of her life as she accused Mr Salmond of creating a “conspiracy theory” to defend himself from reckoning with misconduct allegations, of which he was cleared in court.
