Salmond and Sturgeon: a Troubled Union

BBC Scotland/iPlayer

***

She arrives first. Shifts in her chair, tries for a smile but the heart is not in it.

He is in a different location. Tired. Eyes darting, shoulders up at his ears.

“All good?” a voice from behind the camera asks him.

He sighs, hard enough to blow a house down.

All good? How could it be all good when this pair can’t be in the same room together? Even on Couples Therapy, BBC2’s look inside the consulting room of a Manhattan therapist, the warring parties manage to share a couch. But then these two former First Ministers of Scotland are not a couple. They are … well, what exactly?

That’s one of the questions you might expect to be answered by Salmond and Sturgeon: a Troubled Union, a new two-part BBC Scotland documentary aiming to make sense of one of the deepest and most damaging splits in modern politics.

There have been feuds, and documentaries about feuds, before. Relations between Thatcher and her ministers were picked over endlessly, the Blair-Brown rivalry generated drama and documentary, ditto the Johnson-Cummings dispute. But there has been nothing as raw and personal as the clash between Salmond and Sturgeon, a battle so red in tooth and claw I half expected David Attenborough to be the narrator (the gig goes instead to Scottish actor Rona Morison).

After the initial scene setting the film gets down to business. It is November 2014, the SNP conference, the peak of the Salmond and Sturgeon era. Membership has passed 92,000 and the mentor is handing on the torch.

All is well, but fast forward to today and here’s Roseanna Cunningham. “It would have been difficult to have predicted Nicola the rockstar that we got,” she says. “You’re thinking who is this person, where has she come from, what have you done with Nicola?”

The talking heads appear thick and fast now. Some prompt eye rolls, others inward boos. It’s like watching a panto except there is no one to cheer.

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Liz Lloyd, Sturgeon’s former chief of staff, pops up. She is smiling. As soon becomes evident, that does not bode well for Salmond.

Of his move to the Commons, frowned upon by those who wanted him to disappear into retirement, Lloyd says: “There were a group of MPs who wanted to learn from Alec. For others he was a bit of a relic.” Later, she will dispense with any attempt at nicety and simply refer to him as “Salmond”.

From 2014 the clock spins back to 1987. A skinny Salmond, a deadly serious Sturgeon, John Swinney with hair, Thatcher, the poll tax, Job Centres, Gordon Brown, Donald Dewar, Gordon Wilson, all the old songs and faces.

We see footage of what looks like an SNP youth disco. Oh look, there’s Shona Robison and her Shirley Temple curls, Nicola and her Tracey Thorn do. A crowd of them shuffling earnestly from one foot to the other in the standard Scottish disco dance. Happy, innocent days, when ferries and attainment gaps and scandal were but dots on a distant horizon.

The Rock ‘n’ Roll Years-style canter through the past is mildly entertaining, but what are we learning here that is new? Short answer: zip. It’s a reheat of history, a rehash of battles past, with no piercing insights or revelations along the way. It’s left to those in the SNP tent to tell the story, and we’ve heard it many times before.

From here, though, things start to look up. Early signs of tension in the Salmond-Sturgeon relationship begin to show. Well done to the Indiana Jones on the team who found the clip of the pair meeting the press and him referring to her as “the headmistress”.

A few more like that would have livened up the hour no end. Even that would not have solved the fundamental problem with the film - it misses the real story.

The real story, the fresher story, the one viewers are far more interested in, is the one that is unfolding now under the heading of Operation Branchform. But the filmmakers cannot dig into that subject for obvious legal reasons. This begs the question of whether they should have waited till the dust settled on the whole story, assuming it ever does.

I should stress that this is a review of the first part of the series, which airs next Tuesday. There are signs of more interesting terrain ahead when the second part arrives on Wednesday. The observations of the key players become more cutting, teeth are bared. A revelation emerges and there is a quote from Sturgeon that’s a cracker of a scene-setter.

Roll on part two.

Salmond and Sturgeon: a Troubled Union, 10pm, Tuesday and Wednesday, BBC Scotland and iPlayer