Jenny Lindsay in The Scotsman on Nicola Sturgeon:
Nicola Sturgeon, former First Minister and SNP leader, presided over the worst period of profound misogyny in Scotland in my lifetime. Women’s right to any spaces and services of their own, won historically on the basis of sex, came within a whisker of being obliterated, with her full, ongoing, ‘I will never apologise’ approval.
Any woman opposing this erasure – the end result of her ‘self-ID’ policy push, where even male double-rapists must be viewed as women if they want to be – were punished and hounded, including women inside her own party.
It has therefore provoked understandable impatience that Sturgeon and her acolytes have spent much of the last week crying ‘sexism’ and ‘misogyny’ as she faces questions over her estranged husband, Peter Murrell’s, admission of appropriating SNP party funds when Chief Executive.
She really ticks all the boxes, doesn’t she.
Sturgeon’s handling of Murrell’s guilty plea last week on the charge of embezzling £400,000 of party funds has been graceless. It’s also surprising, given she must have known such a plea was forthcoming.
Instead of clearing the diary, preparing a statement to the effect she was taking time to deal with the – perfectly understandable – feelings of betrayal as a spouse, she has gone on defensive mode very publicly.
Speaking at the Hay-On-Wye literary festival, Sturgeon raged she was being ‘held responsible’ for the actions of her husband. ‘It is the age-old cry of when a man does something wrong, well, the woman must have known about it, somehow it’s her fault,’ she snapped, when questioned.
Well, think of it this way. His doings hint at a certain kind of character. She was married to him. You do the math.
This is crass. It’s neither ‘sexist’ nor ‘misogynist’, as Sturgeon supporters have wailed this week, to question the incuriosity about luxury items turning up in her own home. Her justifications she was busy, wasn’t home much, she and Murrell had large enough salaries to justify £2k designer salt and pepper pots and various £500 Montblanc fountain pens are, in fairness, plausible. They’re beside the point, though.
Now you know where the luxury fountain pens question came from.
She presided over a regime where questioning her led to bullying and many subsequent resignations, while she and ambitious, younger colleagues pushed the maddest, misogynist ideology – gender identity – while turning a blind eye to excessive abuse of women, including party colleagues.
Her attempts to claim she’s judged by different standards from men is an absurdity; a cynical attempt at dodging responsibility from a highly-skilled mistress of spin.
A highly-skilled mistress of spin who threw women overboard.