From the journal of Nicola Sturgeon

May 6, 2026

“You must fall on your sword,” they urged. And get this: “The future of Scottish independence is at stake.” That one made me laugh. “Since when did independence ever affect your thinking before now, you unctuous and sanctimonious shower of chancers,” I replied.

“You’ve all done very well out of this devolution malarkey,” I reminded them. “Swinney, you’d be nothing more than a diversity facilitator in Clackmannanshire Council if you hadn’t hitched a ride on this gravy train. And don’t you even think about it, Russell. You’d be teaching Ned Latin to day-releasers on a Highlands and Islands facilitator course.”

Swinney was now starting to hyper-ventilate and Russell began mouthing something about Roman consuls and hot baths, the pompous old glove-puppet. Smith had been brought in to give the impression that the progressives were in on this too, but now he was actually crying and saying “this is the worst day of my life since I had to hand back the keys of my Brussels apartment”.

“I’m going nowhere,” I told them. “And if any of you even think about trying to stage a coup and replace me with that smug carpet-bagger Robertson well, think again. I know where all the bodies are buried because I f***ing buried them. Wee Kate Forbes would wipe the floor with the lot of you anyway and that’s why she’ll be succeeding me. But only when I say so.”

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And so I survived my ambush by the men in grey suits. At least the ones who forced out Thatcher had the decency to wear some quality threads. This lot turned up trying to look authoritative in Matalan and River Island. I’ve seen meaner-looking space-hoppers.

Look, I know that people see me and Peter and think we’re an odd pairing: him, the high-flying technocrat who could have had his pick of top positions at the Co-op funeral parlours and juicy store managerships at Amazon; me, the couthy Ayrshire lass with the killer Louboutins. But isn’t it amazing how much a little black book of low crimes and misdemeanours stretching back through your long years as Chief Executive works as an aphrodisiac?

That insidious wee rattlesnake Harvey had even tried to muscle in on the action. Apparently, Robertson had promised him ring-fenced funding for glamping-pod and bivouac developments on the edge of our biggest towns and cities to ease the social housing crisis. There would be no cars or street-lighting and large pits containing sustainable chemicals would serve as the world’s first open-air, non-binary toilet facilities so that we could meet our carbon reduction targets.

The wee man is the only politician in the UK who thinks anyone’s actually serious about the climate change grift, but it comes in handy when we need his votes to get the budgets through. You’ve no idea what we’ve had to promise him to shut him up. My favourite was the funding for portable chip-oil converters for every household in Possilpark and Easterhouse as a pilot scheme for renewable petrol sources.

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And so, to paraphrase Gloria Gaynor, I did survive. And now they’re all glad I did. The last five years haven’t been half bad: we keep asking for the Section 30s and Boris keeps knocking them back. And so the pension-pots keep boiling away nicely and we get to pretend we’re really annoyed about it. Meanwhile that light in Brussels has been on so long that Harvie’s beginning to ask questions about unnecessary energy consumption.

Humza’s Hate Crime Bill has settled down quite nicely too. We’ve created 5,000 new jobs in the Hate Crime Monitor Sector and the official state-approved Catholic Church carried our 10-point inclusion plan. This included them agreeing to change the intro to the Lord’s Prayer and declaring Francis of Assisi to be the world’s first transgender saint. That way, they got to keep their faith schools.

The re-training camps, which we sub-contracted to the Hunter Foundation, have also been a huge success. We fast-tracked their planning applications for leadership centres on many of our major lochs so that poor families could enjoy a two-week break in remote rural settings while learning citizenship classes from the Little Red Book of Kindness.

The new powers for Police Scotland have gone down well too. That 25 per cent pay rise across the board has worked a treat and they’ve been reassuringly assiduous about breaking up protests by more than 20 people on the old Covid variant pretext.

Of course, we’re still using the EU to keep the wider movement on the teat. Admittedly, their decision to do away with Greece and force Latvia and Estonia into giant forced labour camps to service their debts to the Bundesbank was a tough sell but we’ve found that if you keep banging on about Erasmus – even if no-one knows what it means – it becomes like a wee, holy grail.

The plan to nationalise Celtic and Rangers and merge them hasn’t yet cut down hate crime as our hate monitors have reported the increased presence of the flags of Beitar Jerusalem FC and Hilal Al-Quds FC as well as Lazio and Roma. The decision to work with Interpol and MI5 in the apprehension of the Rev Stuart Campbell was a success, although his most fervent disciples regularly report sightings of him despite the CIA assuring us of his successful rendition in Guantanamo Bay.

A new book, Das Kapitalist (It’s Pure Different Class) successfully takes the radical edge off Marx and recalibrates it for an enlightened, inclusive and inclusively enlightened Scotland. The editing panel was brought together by Charlotte Street Partners under the chairmanship of the Duke of Buccleuch and sponsored by Aberdeen Asset Management.

The Covid Mental Health co-ordinator; Jason Leitch’s new game show: Hands, Face and Oops-a-daisy sees groups of elderly and vulnerable people given heavy doses of the Covid but their chances of survival are improved the more they stick to the rules. The longer they survive sees them win major prizes for their families. It’s a great way of relieving pressure on the care home sector while reinforcing good public health messages.

Saor Alba.

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