Tag Archives: edinburgh festival

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.