Frankly, page 38
The exception was 2020, during Covid, when, instead of an in-person audience, I spoke to her on the phone. If anything, chatting to the Queen on the phone as she walked around the gardens at Windsor Castle was even more surreal than seeing her face to face. It was the Balmoral audiences I enjoyed most. She was always relaxed and chatty, and these sessions would typically last for around an hour.
Conversation would range far and wide. She would talk about the goings on in the Deeside communities around the Balmoral estate, as well as current issues in Scotland, the UK and internationally. She was incredibly well informed about everything, from the very local to the truly global. In some ways, prepping for one of these audiences was more nerve-wracking than getting ready for First Minister’s Questions. I always tried to anticipate what she might want to talk about and make sure I had all the facts at my fingertips. Invariably, though, she would raise something I hadn’t expected. What I loved most was hearing stories about her interactions with different world leaders down the decades. Chatting to her was like being given a private window onto all the big events and key personalities of twentieth-century history. It was remarkable.
The conversations weren’t all serious, though. She talked a lot about her family, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren especially. I remember telling her once that I thought Princess Charlotte looked like her and immediately panicking that I might have strayed too far into the personal. I needn’t have worried. She lit up with a beaming smile, clearly thrilled that the resemblance had been noted.
She also loved a bit of gossip. She always wanted to hear the stories behind the political headlines. I recall my audience with her at Balmoral just a couple of weeks after the allegations about Alex Salmond had become public. I had assumed she wouldn’t mention it, but was worried that it might then be an elephant in the room. I couldn’t have been more wrong. She asked me about it almost as soon as I sat down. She wasn’t being trivial in any way, but it was clear that she wanted to know more of what was going on. I think she was also trying to put me at ease. That, in fact, was the most remarkable thing about these discussions. No matter how nervous I was in advance, she always made me feel comfortable. I felt able to talk freely, to open up and share whatever was on my mind. I also don’t recall a single moment when I thought the conversation might dry up.
At Balmoral, the audiences would be followed by drinks in the drawing room. The Queen would play cards while the rest of us milled around her. I usually got to the drawing room just ahead of her and was always struck by the aura she exuded as she entered the room. Maybe it is because so much of her reign was in the days before twenty-four-hour news, and certainly before social media, that there seemed to be a dignified distance between her and the public. She also came from a time when people had a greater sense of deference. In short, there was a mystique around her that no other member of the Royal Family comes close to having.
After drinks, we would have dinner, usually a barbecue at one of the bothies on the estate. One of these had been built by Queen Victoria to give Prince Albert somewhere to sleep if he went out hunting and left it too late to get back to the castle before dark. This story was recounted to Peter and me by the Queen herself as she drove us there on our first visit, in 2015.
Until the last year or so of his life, the barbecue would be cooked by Prince Philip, who could not have been more different in private to his public persona. He and I would usually sit together at dinner and the conversation would always be dominated by our shared love of books. As he cooked, the Queen would set the table. We were given strict instructions not to try to help her. At the end of the evening, she would clear up and pack any leftovers into Tupperware boxes.
The last time I saw the Queen at Balmoral was in September 2021. I was struck by how frail she was. This was the day that she had started using a walking stick, though it would be another couple of weeks before she appeared in public with it. Despite her obvious fragility, she soldiered on through dinner. There was no question of her not fulfilling her duties.
The final time I saw her was at Holyrood Palace in June 2022. She was in great form and seemed much stronger than during our last meeting. She had just celebrated her Platinum Jubilee and we chatted about how much she had enjoyed it. She told me that, when she had filmed the Paddington Bear sketch, she hadn’t really known what it was about. It was only when she later saw it on TV that it made sense. She was quite exercised that day about an ugly structure that had been erected in the Holyrood gardens to sta-bilize the twelfth-century abbey that sits in the grounds. I promised to make the Chief Executive of Historic Environment Scotland aware of her concerns and did so when I got back to my office.
As I left her, she asked if we had a date for Balmoral yet. I said we did – 19 September – and that I was looking forward to it. Graciously, she said she was too. Those were the last words I exchanged with this extraordinary woman.
The day of 8 September started out unremarkably. At 12 noon, I was in the Scottish Parliament chamber for First Minister’s Questions. Just a few minutes into the session, as I was being quizzed on overdue ferries and the cost-of-living crisis, John Swinney passed me a note. The Permanent Secretary had texted to say that Buckingham Palace was about to release a statement about the health of the Queen. It was one of those messages that said very little and absolutely everything at the same time. In that moment, there was no doubt in my mind that the Queen’s death had either already occurred or was imminent. The rest of the session passed in a blur.
Sitting on my desk when I got back to my office was the briefing folder for Operation Unicorn, the blueprint to be followed in the event of the Queen dying in Scotland. I had been updated on these arrangements periodically since becoming First Minister, but, as when I was first told about them, I had never believed they would be needed while I was in office. Sadly, I was wrong.
Later that afternoon, as I chaired an emergency meeting to make sure all necessary steps were being taken to implement Operation Unicorn, we received informal confirmation that the Queen had died. The emotion in the room was raw. John Swinney was there, as were a handful of senior officials. The Lord Lyon King of Arms, a lovely man called Joe Morrow, who amongst his other duties oversees ceremonial occasions in Scotland, was sitting next to me. I could tell Joe was on the verge of tears, understandably so, as he knew the Queen well. I sensed that everyone needed a moment, so I suggested a short silence for us to reflect and remember. Afterwards, I said a few words in tribute. We resolved to do everything we could to give Her Majesty the send-off from Scotland she deserved. We were determined that Scotland would do her proud, and I think we did.
She left Balmoral for the final time on Sunday, 11 September, and arrived at Holyrood Palace a few hours later. The route was lined with people from Scotland and further afield, all there to witness history and pay quiet respect. The TV shots were beautiful, the Scottish countryside playing its part in a fitting farewell.
The service at St Giles’ Cathedral the following day was deeply moving. She lay in state there overnight, with thousands queuing for the chance to walk past her coffin. I gave a reading from the first lesson of Ecclesiastes 3:1–15: ‘For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die.’ I have made many high-profile and high-pressured appearances over my career, but I had rarely been as nervous as I was on this occasion. On Tuesday, I went to a much smaller ceremony in St Giles’, attended mainly by members of her family, to witness her coffin begin the journey to Edinburgh Airport. Watching the RAF plane take off from Edinburgh and slowly disappear into the distance as Queen Elizabeth departed Scotland for the final time was, for me, the most moving moment of the whole week of mourning. Not even her funeral, a few days later, surpassed it.
Queen Elizabeth II was an incredible woman (the ‘II’ has always been controversial north of the border – Elizabeth I was never Queen of Scotland, as her reign was prior to the Union of the Crowns). Having had the opportunity to observe the Royal Family up close, I have little doubt that history, however long the sweep of it might be in this respect, will look back on the day of her death as the beginning of its end.
During the 2016 Scottish election, I had taken part in a hustings arranged by the LGBTQ+ campaign organization, Stonewall. Alongside me were Tory leader Ruth Davidson, Labour’s Kezia Dugdale, Patrick Harvie for the Greens and Willie Rennie of the Lib Dems.
Someone in the audience asked us if we would commit to reforming the process for a trans person to obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate and legally change gender. The existing process, enshrined in the UK-wide Gender Recognition Act 2004, was considered to be intrusive, overly medicalized and deeply stigmatizing. A trans person had to live in their acquired gender for at least two years, obtain two medical opinions confirming a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and then submit evidence to a panel for review and decision.
That night, there was unanimity amongst the various party leaders on the general principle that a process of self-identification should replace the existing requirements. A move towards self-identification was not putting Scotland in the vanguard of social policy. It was already the reality in many other countries, including the Republic of Ireland. It was also being considered by the UK government. It was in this context that, ahead of the 2016 Holyrood election, all parties in Scotland pledged to reform the 2004 Act.
From a more recent perspective, it seems hard to believe that political consensus once prevailed on this issue, but it did. Even when we consulted on possible legislation in 2018 and the volume of media commentary increased, and became more critical, there was no sense that this was an issue worrying people to any great extent. That remained the case for some time. I remember being asked by a journalist towards the end of the 2021 Scottish election if I was concerned about the impact the issue might be having. I was genuinely confused. It had been raised with me on the doorstep just once in the entirety of that campaign, by someone intending to vote for Alex Salmond’s new party.
However, by the time the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill came to be considered by the Scottish Parliament, it had deeply divided the body politic. The legislation was finally passed on 22 December 2022, after the most toxic few days I had ever experienced in the almost quarter of a century that I had served as a Member of Parliament. For two consecutive nights, MSPs sat well into the early hours of the next morning. The ‘debate’ was a bin-fire of filibustering, fearmongering and insults. It wasn’t all in one direction, but, whether this was the intention or not, it gave vent to the open demonization of trans people, already one of the most vulnerable and stigmatized groups in society.
I cannot begin to imagine what it must have felt like to be a trans woman listening in to these exchanges and hearing it implied that you were, almost by definition, a sexual predator, a danger to women. And for the countless men out there who are predators, rapists, domestic abusers of women, it must have felt like one big ‘get out of jail free’ card, as attention turned away from them and towards a tiny minority, out of which an even tinier minority have ever behaved in such a way.
It was deeply unpleasant. After the second night of debate, I got back to Bute House around 3 a.m. I was exhausted, but knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. The nasty, shrill, toxic rhetoric was ringing in my head. I needed to dislodge it and so, as I have done throughout my life, I turned to books. I lay in bed for a while reading a novel called Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield and allowed some beautiful prose to cleanse my mind.
And yet, horrible though it all was, it seemed to me that the issue still wasn’t stirring strong public concern. It was much higher up the news agenda and certainly much more talked about than it had been before. People were more likely to offer strident opinions, for and against, but there was no sense amongst the general population of the anger, bordering on hysteria, that was being displayed by campaigners.
Of course, this would be cited by some as evidence of how out of touch I had become, and maybe there is an element of truth in that. However, in that moment, I don’t think I was entirely wrong in my analysis.
I left Parliament on 22 December 2022, at the start of the Christmas recess, feeling depressed by the experience of the preceding days, but also hopeful that the worst was behind us. The law was on the statute book, it would come into force in due course, and, when the dire predictions of those opposed to the change didn’t come to pass, the controversy would settle. Or so I dared hope.
My optimism was bolstered the following day when I went to buy my mum’s Christmas present at her favourite wool shop. I remember feeling a bit nervous as I went in, wondering if I would get a hostile reaction from other customers in light of the previous days’ debate. Instead, I had a truly uplifting conversation, which reduced me almost to tears. On the shop counter as I made my purchase was a tray with four champagne glasses. The owner of the shop explained that after the legislation had passed the day before, the mother of one of her staff members, a young trans man, had turned up with a bottle of champagne and they had celebrated the positive difference he believed the new law would make to his life. A customer then said she thought I should be proud of making Scotland a fairer place and hoped I would stand strong in the face of all the hate. I couldn’t have asked for a better Christmas gift.
My optimism was short-lived. In the early weeks of 2023, it was shattered, and with it any notion that this was an issue only exercising the political bubble. In mid-January, the UK government re-ignited the controversy with a decision to deploy the never-before-used section 35 of the Scotland Act to challenge the new law on the grounds that it interfered with Westminster powers.
It was preposterous, but suited the Tory agenda perfectly. Not only did it undermine the authority and autonomy of the Scottish Parliament, increasingly a Tory tactic in the fight against independence, but it also exacerbated the kind of culture war the Tories saw as motivational for their natural support.
That move was incendiary, but it was a different spark that set things properly on fire. At the end of January, a trans woman called Isla Bryson was convicted of raping two women and was immediately taken to a female prison. This was a development that gave a human face to fears that until then had been abstract for most people. According to opponents of the law, here was a real-life example of a dangerous sexual predator gaining access to vulnerable women by virtue of ‘pretending’ to be a woman.
It also completely blindsided me. I had no advance warning that the case was pending. To this day, I don’t understand how it could be that no one in the Scottish Prison Service or Scottish government officialdom thought it important to flag it up to me. It isn’t for a First Minister to decide which prison an individual goes to, as that is an operational matter, but with some advance warning I could have been ready to explain, and hopefully calm, the situation. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered, the damage might have been done anyway, but at least I could have tried.
The new law had no bearing on which prison Isla Bryson was taken to – and wouldn’t have done even if it had been in force. The Scottish Prison Service was simply following long-established procedures in dealing with trans prisoners. The prisoner would be assessed, if necessary in isolation, and, if considered a risk to female inmates, taken to a male prison and looked after there. The SPS had been dealing, appropriately and effectively, with situations like this for years. The challenge of trans prisoners was not a new one. However, by the time any of these points could be made, the story had gone nuclear and I was on the back foot, fighting a fire that was already out of control.
There haven’t been many times in my career when my communication skills deserted me as utterly as they did in the face of this controversy. Maybe my confidence had been damaged more than I realized by the intensity of the vitriol flung at me. Or maybe I was just losing my touch. Whatever the reason, when confronted with the question ‘Is Isla Bryson a woman?’ I was like a rabbit caught in the headlights. The fact that I wasn’t the first, and certainly not the last, politician to be felled by this ‘gotcha’ question was no comfort.
Given what Bryson had been convicted of, I knew that saying yes would enrage people and inflame the situation. Saying no, though, would allow the opponents of the new self-identification law to say that they had been right all along about the impact on women-only spaces – which, in my view, they absolutely hadn’t been. Moreover, it seemed obvious to me – media frenzy aside – that the gender question was not the relevant issue in this context. What mattered was that Isla Bryson is a rapist. Identifying as a woman did not confer any automatic right to be accommodated in a female prison. Any convicted trans woman considered a risk to female inmates would be sent to a man’s prison, as in fact Isla Bryson quickly was. This all seemed very rational. The problem was that, in a febrile atmosphere, I was unable to communicate it in a way that cut any ice. Because I failed to answer ‘yes’, plain and simple, to the basic question, I seemed weak and evasive. Worst of all, I sounded like I didn’t have the courage to stand behind the logical conclusion of the self-identification system we had just legislated for.
In football parlance, I lost the dressing room. From then on, I was on the defensive. What I had told myself was the situation – that the public weren’t concerned – was no longer true. The Isla Bryson case was the break that opponents of the law had been waiting for. The fears they had been trying, and largely failing, to stoke were brought vividly to life in the face of a ‘monster’.
The trans debate was one of the most bruising episodes of my time in politics. That might seem an odd thing to say, given the many other ‘controversies’ I have been involved in over the years. I helped lead a campaign that almost broke up the United Kingdom. I had a brutal falling-out with my political mentor. Yet never before had I received the type or intensity of vitriol – much of it deeply misogynist – that was and still is thrown at me over gender recognition reform.
