{"id":76227,"date":"2025-08-18T20:26:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-18T20:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/76227\/"},"modified":"2025-08-18T20:26:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T20:26:09","slug":"jk-rowling-compares-nicola-sturgeons-memoir-to-twilight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/76227\/","title":{"rendered":"JK Rowling compares Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir to Twilight"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s impossible to read Nicola Sturgeon\u2019s memoir without remembering the smash hit fictional franchise, Twilight<\/a> by Stephenie Meyer. <\/p>\n

The heroine of Twilight, a shy, awkward, bookish girl, moves to a small, rainswept town called Forks to live with her single father.<\/p>\n

The heroine of Frankly is also a shy, awkward, bookish girl who lives in a small, rainswept town\u2026 Both shy, insecure teenagers have dates with destiny. Nicola Sturgeon will one day become First Minister of Scotland<\/a>. Bella Swan will join the ranks of the undead.<\/p>\n

Like all well-rounded characters, Bella Swan has flaws. She\u2019s clumsy and accident-prone, traits that only make her more dorkily loveable.<\/p>\n

\"Bella<\/p>\n

Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart in Twilight the movie<\/p>\n

Summit Entertainment\/Entertainment One UK<\/p>\n

Sturgeon talks quite a lot about becoming a well-rounded person in Frankly, usually in the context of regretting that she wasn\u2019t one in her hyper-ambitious youth. She admits that she, too, has flaws: lack of confidence, fear of failure, and a heart that simply cares too much. The epigraph of her memoir is a quotation from Eleanor Roosevelt: \u2018Do what you feel in your heart to be right \u2013 for you\u2019ll be criticized anyway.\u2019 Sturgeon\u2019s alleged imposter syndrome and constant crises of confidence don\u2019t prevent her admitting to \u2018the raw talent I had for politics\u2019, or that \u2018I certainly wasn\u2019t lacking in ability\u2019, that \u2018far from being the weak link, I was seemingly the star attraction\u2019.<\/p>\n

Nicola Sturgeon, perception and reality<\/p>\n

This bombast is likely to shock some of my liberal London friends who\u2019ve frequently told me, especially during the pandemic, how lucky I was to have such an an earnest, down-to-earth leader in charge. They, of course, were subject to the whims of the then prime minister Boris Johnson, who could have been replaced with three ferrets in a sack and the only change would have been a slight increase in decisiveness and gravitas, so, to them, Sturgeon seemed a paragon of sober governance.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

JK Rowling wrote the Harry Potter novels (Ian West\/PA)<\/p>\n

PA Archive<\/p>\n

Her English fans can\u2019t be expected to know about every single clusterfuck over which the supposedly competent Sturgeon presided, and they certainly won\u2019t find out about them from Frankly. The mysteriously vanished government WhatsApp messages from the pandemic, the tanking educational outcomes, the CalMac Ferry disaster, the disappearance of a half a million pounds of her own supporters\u2019 money that was supposedly ringfenced for a new independence referendum: you\u2019ll search in vain for candid accounts of these in Frankly; indeed, most aren\u2019t mentioned at all. Perhaps the most disgraceful omission \u2013 and I\u2019ll admit to a personal interest here, because I\u2019m married to a doctor who used to run a methadone clinic, so saw the national scandal up close \u2013 is the fact that Scotland continues to lead the whole of Europe in drug deaths. <\/p>\n

On the Scottish independence referendum, 2014<\/p>\n

I doubt many No voters are going to be won over by Frankly. This is partly because Sturgeon doesn\u2019t make a single argument for Scottish independence we haven\u2019t heard a thousand times, but mostly because of the quite extraordinary obtuseness she displays in talking about the referendum of 2014.<\/p>\n

\u201cMuch has been written since the referendum about how unpleasant and divisive it was. My experience\u2026 was the opposite of that characterisation\u201d<\/p>\n

Nicola Sturgeon, Frankly<\/p>\n

No shit, Nicola. You, surrounded only by adoring nationalists, flying between public meetings in a helicopter bearing a large image of your own face, enjoying police protection and all the excitement of potentially bringing about your life\u2019s ambition, enjoyed the referendum? I\u2019m amazed.<\/p>\n

Both Sturgeon and her predecessor, Alex Salmond, made great play back in 2014 about how very different their nationalism was to the nasty kind\u2026Oddly, this message didn\u2019t resonate too well with No voters who were being threatened with violence, told to fuck off out of Scotland, quizzed on the amount of Scottish blood that ran in their veins, accused of treachery and treason and informed that they were on the wrong side of, as one \u2018cybernat\u2019 memorably put it, \u2018a straightforward battle between good and evil.\u2019<\/p>\n

Sturgeon and the trans issue<\/p>\n

Notwithstanding all the ruminating on sexism and misogyny Sturgeon does in Frankly, always as it affects her personally, she is unshakeable in her belief that if men put on dresses and call themselves women they can only be doing so with innocent motives. Sturgeon hasn\u2019t been remotely humbled by the Supreme Court ruling that proved her government was forcing a misinterpretation of the UK-wide Equality Act on Scotland, one that robbed women of many single sex spaces and of their very existence as a definable class with rights protected in law.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Frankly is in bookshops now (PA)<\/p>\n

PA Wire<\/p>\n

She remains stubbornly wedded to her belief that it is possible to let some men into women\u2019s spaces on the men\u2019s say so, without letting any man who fancies it come inside. She denies there are any risks to a policy of gender self-identification. She can\u2019t imagine any male predator capitalising on such policies, in spite of the fact that it has, demonstrably, happened many times. She is flat out Trumpian in her shameless denial of reality and hard facts.<\/p>\n

She asks in Frankly what the intentions were, in posting a picture online wearing a T-shirt bearing the words: Nicola Sturgeon, Destroyer of Women\u2019s Rights. She says this was a turning point that changed everything and made her afraid for her physical safety.<\/p>\n

Sturgeon, like Bella Swan, has a complete void where a sense of humour should be<\/p>\n

JK Rowling<\/p>\n

Eleven years ago, when she and I found ourselves on opposite sides of a different public debate, I didn\u2019t hold her accountable for all the threats I received from nationalists, nor for the porn her supporters circulated, with my face pasted onto a naked actress\u2019s body. \u2026 What were my intentions in posting the picture? I hoped journalists would use it as a pretext to confront the First Minister with questions she\u2019d so far either refused to answer, or treated with contempt, when non-famous women asked them.<\/p>\n

But then Isla Bryson<\/a> burst into the news. Bryson, a convicted double rapist, had decided he was a woman and would rather be incarcerated with the sex against which he\u2019d already committed the most male of crimes. When asked on television whether bald, blonde wig-wearing Bryson was a man or a woman, the First Minister, whose composure and articulacy under fire had, for years, been her most potent political asset, made herself look \u2013 and forgive me for employing a PR term here \u2013 a complete fuckwit. She explains in Frankly that she was worried about the impact it would have on trans people if she denied Bryson was a woman.<\/p>\n

Does Sturgeon show any humility about this in Frankly? Come now \u2013 you know our heroine better than that. <\/p>\n

And so to the three hundred thousand pound question: is Frankly a good read? Honestly, only if you find Nicola Sturgeon so fascinating the dull details of her political decision-making intrigue you, and are prepared to accept all her special pleading. The biggest impediment to enjoyment is that Sturgeon, like Bella Swan, has a complete void where a sense of humour should be. <\/p>\n

Of course, I might be missing the point. Maybe Frankly isn\u2019t supposed to entertain, but to serve as what is sometimes called a CV distinguisher? Its author has expressed a fervent wish to escape the confines of Scotland, and is still young enough that a cushy sinecure with UN Women would be welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s impossible to read Nicola Sturgeon\u2019s memoir without remembering the smash hit fictional franchise, Twilight by Stephenie Meyer.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76228,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,39033,39032,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-76227","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-jk-rowling","11":"tag-nicola-stugeon","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76227\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}