It’s that time of year again when Edinburgh transforms into one of the most exciting and occasionally bizarre places on earth.

You can be casually walking down the street and see people dressed up as genitals coming towards you. There are brilliantly creative street artists and ingenious living statues everywhere. It’s also absolutely hoaching with people and this year, with Princes Street remaining closed due to the awful fire last month, getting from A to B is even more frustrating – unless you walk.

LBC host Iain Dale is hosting his regular run of “All Talk” shows with politicians and media types and, as usual, I have tickets for a fair few of them.

His opening interviewee was former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. Opinions about her are very divided, even in this party. South of the border, Lib Dems often love her. North of the border, opinion can be more mixed. I love her. Always have. That’s not to say that I agree with her on everything – although if you take independence out of the picture, we have a lot in common.

Like her, I spent most of my childhood with my head in books. I could not get enough of them. Like her, the political bug hit me early and we both joined our respective parties when we were 16. Like her, feminism is (and always will be) one of the driving forces of my life.

Of course she made mistakes in Government. Who doesn’t? Failure is an integral part of being human. But she put in place the Scottish Child Payment which has at least prevented child poverty from getting worse in Scotland. That and the way she led the nation with clarity and reassurance during Covid (and before that Swine Flu as health secretary) will probably be her greatest legacies in office.

One of the reasons I have always liked her is that when she qualified as a lawyer, she went to work in a law centre, not for a swanky law firm. I always appreciate people who work to give access to justice to those who need it most.

Years ago, when a friend died, she showed me real kindness. She didn’t have to. I was a complete nobody from another political party. Things like that tell you a lot about what makes someone tick.

She tended to keep her sense of fun well hidden when she was First Minister, and nobody could ever accuse her of being lazy. I remember one of her friends saying that it was hard to get her to relax and finish up early the night before her wedding.

It was therefore good to see hungover, sweary Nicola Sturgeon yesterday. A skinful of red wine with friends after a few weeks off the booze had had a predictable effect. She started off by talking about the novel she is writing, a political thriller which is progressing slowly. She said she’d asked her friend the “Quine of Crime” Val McDermid, how to get through Writer’s Block. Val’s pithy response was “Stop faffing about on WhatsApp and write.”

She’s just finished filming War Games on Channel 4 which she enjoyed making. She plays the Deputy PM of the UK with a host of other former ministers and they make decisions, COBRA style, during a rapidly escalating crisis.

There is no doubt that Sturgeon has had a horrific couple of years which culminated in her estranged husband, and former SNP Chief Executive, Peter Murrell being jailed in June for embezzling £400,000 from the SNP.  Her emotional interview with Laura Kuenssberg showed the shock and trauma of that betrayal on her. And attempts to suggest that she was in some way culpable, or that she must have known, are in my view unfair.  Both of them were on substantial incomes with no children so expensive things appearing in the house would not necessarily be red flags. And, let’s face it, she was running the country in some capacity.

During this part of the interview, you could tell from her tone and demeanour that it’s been an awful experience that she is still recovering from. She says that she finds it harder on some days to come to terms with what has happened, how someone she loved and trusted could betray her as spectacularly as she did. She told us she only found out that he was going to plead guilty less than a week before the hearing at the end of May. She discovered for the first time in the documents reported at that hearing that he had been negotiating a guilty plea for nearly three months.

Her description of the inner conflict between caring about the person she’d loved while being increasingly shocked at the person who had betrayed her, with clearly no consideration of her, will be familiar to many.

She feels that a man in her position would not have had the “he must have known” stuff thrown at him. It would be accepted that he would be too busy on the day job to notice what was going on.

There is, though, the issue about the governance of the SNP. During her leadership, I have always felt that power was concentrated in too few hands. She had a very small cabal around her of Murrell, Shona Robison and her then husband Stewart Hosie who made too many of the key decisions. That experience is a warning to any other political leaders who operate in the same way. It will inevitably end in tears of some sort and sow mistrust and division in the party. Iain Dale challenged her on claims made by former SNP committee members, including Joanna Cherry, that she stopped people from seeing the accounts.  When I was treasurer of the Scottish Lib Dems, the executive saw the accounts on a regular basis. Every month the then party manager and I would go through them and note things that needed to be noted and circulate them. Same with the audit reports.

Nicola said yesterday that accounts were an issue for the national treasurer and didn’t have to be signed off by the leader. That is true, and it is also true that the accounts have to be audited. Our auditors, at least, were very thorough. If they wanted to check a receipt for a mop we bought four months ago, we had better be able to produce that mop. It certainly seems that Murrell was pretty clever at covering his tracks in such a way that defied the auditors but I do wonder if effective scrutiny by the party’s executive and finance committees might have flagged up something earlier. That is not entirely Nicola’s fault though. Perhaps those party committees could have asserted themselves better.

It’s hardly surprising that she’s wanted to go and live somewhere else during this time. She’s taken some criticism in the media for going to live in London. As she put it, she doesn’t want Scotland to be ruled by France but she loves Paris.

She pretty much ruled out any return to elected politics, leaving herself just 0.0001% of wriggle room to change her mind. She does, though, want to carry on fighting for the things she believes in. This would never include taking up a seat n the House of Lords, though, which she described as a democratic abomination.

They didn’t get too much into the detail of the gender identity issue, though Iain asked her if she would make some sort of truce with J K Rowling. Nicola said that she was not at war with the billionaire author who gave £70,000 to For Women Scotland’s Supreme Court challenge, but that J K Rowling seemed to be at war with her. I’m not aware of  Nicola calling her names, though. However, Rowling has on more than one occasion personally attacked Sturgeon, most recently on Elon Musk’s hellsite where she said this week (reported in the Times (£):

I’m astonished that Sturgeon turns out to be not only a world-class misogynist, the blindest wife ever to enjoy the fruits of a fraudster husband’s theft, but also profoundly disloyal to the party and the political allies who once revered her.

You could detect that there is no love lost between Nicola and Joanna Cherry. Iain is interviewing the latter on Monday and asked Nicola if she had read her book. She replied that she was now at the stage of her life when she wasn’t going to have enough time to read all the books she wanted to, so she wasn’t going to spend time reading a “shxx” one.

Photo credit: Barry Rhodes

Iain’s fringe shows are never hard-hitting interviews. His aim is to get the audience to know the subject better as a human being. He has his LBC show to hit them about the head with political detail the rest of the year.  He fulfilled the brief very well, asking questions that everyone wanted to know the answers to while keeping the atmosphere light.

Afterwards both signed their new books. Iain has his autobiography out and Nicola’s memoir, Frankly, is out in paperback with a new section covering the most recent events.  I have an affliction at the Festival that I can never walk past a bookstall without buying something so, even though I have the original on Kindle, I bought the paperback.

The show will come out on Iain’s All Talk podcast at some points, where you will be able to hear such gems as which politician Nicola would not like to share a 7 hour train journey with and who was her most difficult PM.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social