Ahead of the release of Frankly, Nicola Sturgeon’s new memoir, Harry Potter author JK Rowling put out a tongue-in-cheek announcement: ‘Calling all British newspapers. I am available to review Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir. No fee required as long as you don’t edit out the swear words.’
It turns out she wasn’t joking. Last night, the promised expletive-laden review appeared on Rowling’s website, entitled ‘The twilight of Nicola Sturgeon’. And it is magical to behold.
‘Twilight’ here is a reference to Stephenie Meyer’s 2005 teen romance novel about vampires. As Rowling describes it, the protagonist, Bella Swan, is a 17-year-old Mary Sue self-insert, whose ‘flaws’ only make her more ‘dorkily lovable’. Sturgeon’s depiction of herself in Frankly is apparently much the same:
‘Sturgeon, like Bella Swan, is a monomaniac. Both are consumed by a single, overriding ambition. In Nicola’s case, it’s independence for Scotland. In Bella’s, it’s having loads of hot sex with Edward Cullen without getting accidentally killed. Spoiler alert: only one of these ambitions is realised.’
The remainder of the review is no less scathing. Rowling is especially critical of Sturgeon’s lack of self-reflection on her many, many failures in office. Most of the ‘clusterfucks’ she is responsible for – from soaring drug deaths and tanking school standards to the party-funding scandal that led to her arrest – are glossed over entirely. The most Sturgeon ever concedes in her memoir, as Rowling has it, is that there are some times when ‘she could – maybe, perhaps, just possibly – have done something a teeny bit better’, before ‘awarding herself an A-’.
Of course, Rowling’s main gripe with Sturgeon is her belief that men can become women at will. ‘She denies there are any risks to a policy of gender self-identification’, Rowling writes. ‘She can’t imagine any male predator capitalising on such policies, in spite of the fact that it has, demonstrably, happened many times.’
Rowling brings up double rapist Isla Bryson, who was placed in a women’s prison on Sturgeon’s watch. It was the case that exploded Sturgeon’s claim that her failed gender-recognition bill posed no risk to women. Even the usually articulate first minister struggled to defend it, making a ‘fuckwit’ of herself in a TV interview. When the scandal came to light, Sturgeon’s primary concern was not women, Rowling writes, but ‘the impact it would have on trans people, if she denied Bryson was a woman’.
Rowling concludes that Frankly is, frankly, rubbish. It reads ‘like a PR statement that’s been through 16 drafts’. Worse, it was written by a woman who encouraged a ‘culture in which women have been silenced, shamed, persecuted and placed in situations that are degrading and unsafe, all for not subscribing to her own luxury beliefs’. Ouch.
It can’t be easy being Sturgeon right now, having your book shredded by the world’s most successful living writer. Then again, perhaps the review is merely Rowling’s attempt at slashing the competition. Fantasy fiction, it seems, is Sturgeon’s speciality, too.
Georgina Mumford is a spiked intern.
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