With Wargame and Murrell, there’s no escaping Sturgeon - Susan Dalgety
Are we never to be free of Nicola Sturgeon? She resigned from her role as First Minister more than three years ago and stood down as a member of the Scottish Parliament at the May election this year.
But like the proverbial bad penny, she keeps turning up, whether it is performing at book festivals, popping up on our social media feeds and now it seems she is going to be a semi-permanent fixture on our TV screens.
She is set to appear as the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister in The Wargame, Sky’s new reality show which airs next month.
The four-part “docuseries”, to give it its Sunday name, will take viewers into a sealed COBRA-style crisis room, where a group of former politicians and military chiefs will wargame a Russian attack on the UK.
Michael Gove, former Tory bigwig, plays the fictional Prime Minister. I hope he is prepared to be betrayed by his number two.
Other notable figures on the show include Jim Murphy, Harriet Harman and Anthony Scaramucci who, in real life, lasted ten days as President Trump’s communications director.
I haven’t decided yet whether I will watch the show – I am not sure the double act of Gove and Sturgeon has enough appeal – but I am sure to tune into the TV drama about Sturgeon and her disgraced husband, Peter Murrell, which has just been commissioned by Channel 5 for broadcast next year.
As Ben Frow, 5’s chief content officer said, the story of how Peter Murrell managed to embezzle £400,000 from the SNP while his wife was in charge is an “epic tale of Shakespearean proportions.”
He described it as an “extraordinary tale of power, envy, deception and greed … both a high-stakes political melodrama and bizarre domestic drama …”
He’s not wrong, but I doubt Sturgeon will agree that her life story is akin to an episode of EastEnders. She has tried to persuade us all that she remains a highly-respected global statesperson and not a figure of fun whose name will be forever associated with motorhomes and £2000 salt and pepper sets.
I have no idea who should play Nicola in the drama. Frow laughingly suggested it might be a role for the Duchess of Sussex, who has just returned to the UK, but I think Meghan is a tad too glamorous to convincingly portray Sturgeon.
But whoever wins the part has their work cut out to make the character appear sympathetic.
I believe Sturgeon when she said she never once noticed the motorhome parked in her mother-in-law’s drive, but I do find it hard to accept that, as leader of her party and First Minister of Scotland, she did not have the nous to properly examine the SNP’s accounts, especially after her husband loaned the party £100,000 in June 2021 because it was so short of cash under her stewardship.
When she was later asked about the dubious transaction, which would have set alarm bells ringing in any normal organisation, she insisted there had been no impropriety, telling journalists: "Look, he made a personal contribution as a supporter of the party and that is the position". As the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction.