The story behind Pat Kane, Nicola Sturgeon and George Galloway picture

There’s Gorgeous George Galloway (indeed looking somewhat less puckered than in later years). There’s a grinning 80s leftover, sporting a long-lamented thatch of hair. And there is a shy, saturnine young woman at the back of the bus: Nicola Sturgeon, looking like she’d rather be anywhere else but here.

Except behind us are thousands of Glasgow citizens, who have poured into George Square a few days after the 1992 UK General Election. They’re responding to calls for a “Scotland United” against the “democratic deficit” – Scots voting one way, England another – and with Scottish self-government, in some form, the means to rectify that.

So we have to be here. We’re a progressive cross-party leadership, of sorts, trying to coalesce around a “multi-option referendum” (Groundhog Day, anyone?).

I’m pretty much SNP-aligned, having recently been barracked by Govan fascists on Jim Sillars’s Snappy Bus. Nicola is due to graduate later that year from the University of Glasgow with a law degree. Two years earlier, as head of the campus Nationalists, she had got me elected as rector, beating the veteran radical Labour MP Tony Benn.

Did she speak to the crowd? I can’t recall. But does she look like she wants to?

My first impression of Nicola was not so much of her dourness, as her intimidating seriousness. Her frowns at my playful deviations from rectorial campaign lines were properly disciplining.

This photo shows her recoiling from the cavorting egos around her – Galloway and myself were bad enough, but the speaking roster that day also included Ricky Ross, David Hayman, Donnie Munro and William McIlvanney.

Even as a student, Nicola made you aware of the difference between being a political dilettante and a professional politician.

I wriggled free from advances made at that time to set me up for a political candidature (the experience of Alex Salmond purring at me in a room above the Cafe Gandolfi, surrounded by acolytes, somehow didn’t close the deal). My deep sense was that representative party politics is best left to those with the stamina and patience for the fray.

Nicola and her grim determination were welcome to it.

It was literally 20 years later that I came back into regular contact with Nicola Sturgeon when she was a fellow board member of Yes Scotland (and the SNP’s director of the indy campaign). She’d been a shadow minister for education since her election to Holyrood in 1999 and had taken on many more senior roles after that.

The shyness had been replaced by a steeliness, something I recognised from my occasional dealings with Salmond in the preceding two decades who was, until recent years, her undoubted mentor.

The political classes think that nothing is more serious than their machinations.

They are practised in the dark arts of arm-twisting, manipulative psychology, score-keeping, and favours-weighing. As she smoothly orchestrated the disputatious crew round the Yes Scotland table, I could see what an operator she’d become.

She did make me laugh once.

I had a wizard wheeze that I should go and join Scottish Labour as an out-and-declared indy supporter – mostly to cause disruption, but also to perhaps flush out the Yes-supporting comrades. “Don’t do that!” Nicola exploded, channelling her inner Irvine. “You’ll get complete pelters!”

We did a Newsnight debate show together, in the last months of the run-up to September 18, 2014.

Never very comfortable with me, Sturgeon obliquely leaned in and muttered, “you can take all the intellectual ones.” Of course, as it turned out, she was lucid and brilliant, expertly fielding questions right across the policy spectrum. I was Walter McWaffle all night.

That Nicola is a Scottish woman from an evidently working-class background, who nevertheless proved herself capable of the highest offices of state, is always going to be what sells her to the many millions who witness her.

It always has for me.

FOR a few months after we lost the indyref, I started up a correspondence – well, I downloaded on her, and she welcomed my contribution – because I remember the Yes board reconvening after the result.

And I particularly recall Nicola’s openness – even fragility – in the face of defeat. “Please don’t hold back in offering advice, even when it’s not asked for” was a line in one of her replies, “it will always be welcome”.

I did hold back, as Sturgeon began her run of national victories at the Scottish and UK elections. She seemed to be in charge of her vote machine, and large amounts of my political stuffing had been knocked out of me by Brexit.

My advice had been something along these lines – that a future consensus for Yes is built not by polarisation but by communities in Scotland feeling a local and tangible sense of self-determination –“small-i” independence as the grounding for “large-I” indy.

But then along came “take back control”, the Brexiteers getting their national project over the line with the urinal winds of anti-immigration policy at their back. How depressing.

Deep down in my guts, I never thought that Nicola Sturgeon really wanted to lead a second campaign for Scottish independence. She was – and I believe, felt – too responsible for the failure of the first one.

She has also been on a long journey towards universalist, human-rights-oriented politics, up and out of the partisan squabble.

You could see her relish the science-first, technocratic challenge of the Covid pandemic.

A demanding, stressful and often tragic job. But compared to hauling a cringe-laden percentage of the Scottish electorate away from their thrawnness about independence? And being the leader of that haul?

Managing the modern plague might readily seem the easier task to Sturgeon.

Despite her own denials, the lamentable personal behaviour of her mentor Salmond, and the burst of popular illiberalism around the Gender Recognition Act, will have hastened Nicola’s departure.

It’s not so much that she outgrew indy – although many times, she’s stated how utilitarian her attitude towards it was. An instrument towards developing a better Scotland; an “existential” not an “essential” identity. Sturgeon even once publicly wondered whether having “national” in the title of the original SNP was the right move.

It’s more that Nicola might have decided to go straight towards her fundamental issues of care of children, and gender equity at an international level instead of thinking they can be articulated while trying to get a country off the starting blocks of nation-statehood.

You’d wish her well in the global fields she will now traverse.

She’s been clearly exhausted by the task of keeping the case for an indy Scotland civic, progressive and modern. That doesn’t mean those efforts should be abandoned.

Sturgeon’s style, values and (some) policies were often the reasons I was able to answer the question “Are you a Scottish Nationalist?” with “no, I’m a Scottish Futurist”.

I hope Nicola’s successor keeps a liberal, future-friendly Scottish nationalism alive.

And a last comment on that picture: Who would you have chosen for future glory? The two balloons or the anorak? Life lesson – don’t discount the anoraks.