Karen, Head Girl and Scottish First Minister: A Review of “Frankly” by Nicola Sturgeon

Since May 1999, Scotland has had a devolved parliament and, since 2007, the country of 5 million has been governed by the Scottish National Party. This overtly Woke party seeks Scottish independence from the UK. In 2014, they were granted a referendum on this, which they lost. Their charismatic leader, Alex Salmond, resigned as “First Minister” due to this humiliating defeat, in which 55% voted against independence. He was replaced by a very different person, his deputy; a childless and not very attractive 44-year-old woman called Nicola Sturgeon. The following year, due to the anomalies of First Past the Post, the SNP won almost all Scottish seats at Westminster. Sturgeon was forced out in 2023, with it clear that she could not secure a second referendum, and was then investigated by the police for embezzlement, of which she, but not her (now-ex) husband, was exonerated.

“Why is Sturgeon of interest to people outside of Scotland, let alone outside of Britain?” you might ask. The answer is that she typifies, in so many ways, a particular social type that has become increasingly prominent in political life over the past twenty years or so.

She is what my colleague Bruce Charlton termed, in our book The Genius Famine, the head girl, except that she is even more fascinating because there are respects in which she deviates from this. The head girl is high in a suite of traits that make her socially effective: she is Agreeable, Conscientious, and reasonably mentally stable, though possibly slightly anxious as this motivates diligence. She is also highly ambitious, at least towards socially approved goals. Though persuasive, she is very different from the “charismatic” — like the heavy-drinking, gambling, risk-taking Alex Salmond — who has the ability to make a cold world seem warm again.

Sturgeon is also a kind of national personality bell curve “representative outlier;” an extreme that reflects the different average of the group to which she belongs. If you’ve ever lived in Scotland (I was a postgraduate at Aberdeen University) then you know her type — the ultimate “Karen” — and you know that you don’t meet quite so many of them in England: the humourless, uptight, dower, morally judgemental and simply rather boring woman who sucks all the joy out of the room. I once worked for the Royal Bank of Scotland and I had a (Scottish) section boss who was just like this. Everybody in our section felt so happy and relaxed when this woman took her two week summer holiday. It was fun working there because Dawn was not there.

Sturgeon is also a Scottish representative outlier because you get pockets of extreme poverty and poor health in Scotland and that, to my surprise, is her background. Her mother was 17 when she was born, there is a long history of serious mental illness in her family, her grandfather was so unhealthy that he died aged 56, the family lived in council housing (“projects” in the US), and Sturgeon was the first person in her family to attend university.

Even before she attended, she got involved with the SNP and, naturally, the autobiography sets out this political career. However, it should be stressed that there is abundant personal comment on the personalities and behaviour of prominent figures along the way — such as Theresa May or Boris Johnson — which is often cutting, always insightful and very much worth reading.

Of May, we learn: “I might have found it easier to find common ground with May on politics, if we had managed to establish better personal chemistry. But it was impossible to build any genuine rapport with her, and I really did try. . . . As we sat down, I made a point of admiring the very stylish shoes she was wearing. Instead of the few moments of ice-breaking chat about shoes I had hoped for, a look of horror crossed her face. For what seemed like an eternity, she said absolutely nothing, staring down at the briefing folder on her lap as if looking for the appropriate ‘line to take’.” As for Boris Johnson, “He appeared much less interested in the substance of what we were discussing than he was in making clever wisecracks and winning debating points. It was dispiriting, but also, at a certain level, fascinating.”

Sturgeon also makes intelligent points about the nature of the Scots. For example, she observes: “It is internalized. It flows from, and in turn feeds, a chronic lack of national confidence.” However, her attitude to nationalism is contradictory. On the one hand she says that anyone living in Scotland is Scottish, but, on the other, she is motivated by a hatred of the great betrayal of 1707, which surely implies that the Scots are a “people.” “Scotland’s independence was forfeited against the will of the people. That gave rise to a deep sense of injustice that has been passed from one generation to the next alongside an abiding conviction that Scotland is a nation in our own right.” The SNP, until Alex Salmond took over, was actually fairly right wing, with its MPs voting, in 1980, to keep homosexual activity illegal in Scotland. I confess I wasn’t aware of this, though I knew they’d been Nazi sympathisers in World War II.

More pertinent, from my perspective, are the insights into Sturgeon’s nature. From the very beginning, it is clear that Sturgeon has what is known as Imposter Syndrome, unless she is being faux-humble in order to manipulate. She claims to be “painfully shy, an introvert, someone who has always struggled to believe in herself” and makes similar statements throughout the book.

I think this is genuine introspection because it is paralleled by the need to very clearly “show off;” to reassure herself of her importance by asserting her accomplishments. “In 2015, the party I led redrew the political map of Scotland. I won all eight of the elections I contested as SNP leader.”

In fact, she’s still boasting about things she did at school: “‘Presented to Nicola Sturgeon — 1st in Modern Studies, 1st in Latin, 1st in English’. Being handed a Nobel Prize wouldn’t have made me any happier.” A more secure person would, to put it in literary terms, “show not tell” their achievements. You see this insecurity with women quite often. In my experience, it is almost always women on Twitter that will put “Dr” or “Prof” as part of their Twitter name and will boast in their “Twitter Bio” about which prestigious university they’ve been to and for which famous magazines they’ve written. Secure people do not bother; but women are high in social anxiety and other Neurotic traits.

The biography also makes clear that Sturgeon, effectively, became First Minister by accident. It happened because she was Alex Salmond’s deputy, so she was already in place during a political crisis. Sanna Marin became Finland’s 34-year-old Prime Minister in similar circumstances. So we can see where the Imposter Syndrome comes from or which factors it might be worsened.

From my perspective, I wanted an insight into the “head girl” and I got it. There is so much to absorb about her as well, she is strangely honest: she admits to drinking too much, to not infrequently drinking alone, and to the poignancy of a miscarriage which was her one chance to have a child; she describes them flushing it down the loo and imagining it might be a girl. She admits to having a mental breakdown, which rather deviates from the Head Girl archetype, though she would be, I suppose, more Neurotic than a high-status male.

From the poor and clichéd style (“cats and dogs galore,” “Dunure was truly magical”), it’s also fairly clear that Sturgeon wrote the first few chapters herself and did so quite a while ago. She notes “David was twenty-nine years my senior but, in 1992, still only fifty-one, younger than I am now.” Sturgeon was born in 1970 and she dates her Preface April 2025. So, it’s obvious what’s happened. Soon, the ghost writer hits in, however, and the book transforms into an exciting read. Sturgeon may well disagree with me on almost everything, but this book was very much worth my time.