Nicola Sturgeon was always afraid of failure. But it was a very particular kind of failure she feared; one that follows a very particular kind of success. Living up to the fact of being Scotland’s first female first minister became, she writes in her new memoir, “almost an obsession”, which is arguably unhealthy but not unreasonable. To be the first woman (or indeed the first minority) in any field is to be uncomfortably aware of being on probation: the test case that sceptics will use to decide whether women in general can really hack it, but also the yardstick by which other women will judge whether representation actually makes a difference.
You daren’t betray anything that looks like a sign of weakness, yet at the same time you’re endlessly under pressure to spill your guts on all the intimate stuff – miscarriage and menopause in Sturgeon’s case, pregnancy in high office for New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, also the author of a recent memoir – lest other women feel you’re either holding out on useful information, making it all look too infuriatingly easy, or failing to do your bit to break some taboo. (Even Sturgeon, in an interview this week with the midlife women’s podcast The Shift, expressed surprise that, when she was figuring out how to manage menopausal symptoms in office, she couldn’t find anything to read about how other senior politicians had coped.) Suddenly, you’re not just a woman but an everywoman, supposed to magically embody every female voter who ever existed, even on issues where women in real life are impossibly divided – as they were over trans rights, the issue that ultimately holed Sturgeon’s premiership below the waterline.
Representation can be a blessing and curse, even for a politician as gifted as Sturgeon undoubtedly has been. But is it also ultimately a distraction?
Her book completes a trio of recent memoirs, alongside those of Ardern and Germany’s Angela Merkel, which feel like a final full stop on the end of an era in which putting a woman in power was expected somehow to change everything. All three at their peak were somewhat romantically held aloft as examples of a kinder, more emotionally literate politics: Merkel for opening her arms to Syrian refugees; Ardern for the unifying way she led her country through the immediate and potentially divisive aftermath of the Christchurch terrorist massacre; and Sturgeon for being the remain voter’s feminist yin to Boris Johnson’s laddish Brexiter yang.
All three functioned at times as queens across the water for English leftwingers, wondering wistfully why they couldn’t have a leader like that. During the 2015 televised election debates in which Sturgeon took part, viewers furiously Googled whether it was possible to vote SNP south of the border. Merkel’s principled pushback against Donald Trump in his first presidency – remember that iconic image of her looming commandingly over a seated Trump at a G7 summit? – was as much admired and envied in parts of the UK as Ardern’s “zero Covid strategy” of sealing borders, at least until the latter was overwhelmed by new variants.
Yet all three became bitterly polarising figures in time, as Sturgeon herself acknowledged to The Shift’s Sam Baker. The nature of the tribe in charge might have changed, but not the angry tribalism endemic in politics: so much for the patronising Barbieworld fantasy that if women ran the world, peace and love would rule the day.
With hindsight, though, what all three of those pioneer female leaders really represented was a longing for someone to break the mould, and that hasn’t gone away. If anything, the impatience and frustration with mainstream politics building up in younger women suggests it is intensifying.
The Scottish journalist Alex Massie wrote this week of the English tendency to idolise Sturgeon from a distance, even as Scots who experienced her government’s failings up close were losing patience with it. As an English journalist, I have to concede some truth in that. From a distance, it’s too easy to get hung up on the performance of leadership, at which she genuinely did excel, and forget about what it actually feels like to be governed by someone day in and day out. During the pandemic, I remember envying the way Scottish lockdown restrictions took into account children’s need for play, but more broadly the thought and seriousness that seemed to be going into Sturgeon’s policymaking when Johnson was still making jokes about squashing sombreros or turning a blind eye to drunken parties.
Yet death rates in Scotland weren’t noticeably better than in England, for reasons the Covid inquiry is still exploring. Meanwhile, in New Zealand, Ardern was failing to hit her much-vaunted targets on child poverty, a reminder that personal values don’t necessarily trump the realities of a post-lockdown economy.
The obvious moral to be drawn from all of this is that putting women on a pedestal simply because they’re women makes no more sense than taking lumps out of them for the same reason: that in a mature democracy, they would be judged simply on results. Since the least interesting thing about Kemi Badenoch’s increasingly erratic leadership of the Conservative party is her gender, perhaps it’s not too much to hope that we’re moving in that direction: that the joy of being the third or fourth or fifth woman through the door is that eventually people simply cease to care. But, if so, it will be the Sturgeons and the Arderns and the Merkels, with all their flaws, who paved the way.
