Joanna Cherry has fired back at Nicola Sturgeon after the former first minister described her as “obsessed”, accusing her of lacking openness about her sexuality and suggesting she no longer has a “proper job”.
Speaking to an audience at the Edinburgh Fringe, the former SNP MP said: “Don’t worry, Nicola, I’m not obsessed with you. Unlike you, I have a very happy and meaningful career to fall back on.”
She added: “And also, perhaps in contrast to her, I have a very strong and happy relationship with my girlfriend, and I’m open about my sexuality, and have been for a very long time.”
Ms Cherry, a prominent KC, went on to claim that Ms Sturgeon “flirts and teases us with the idea that she might be a lesbian”, while saying the former SNP leader had no real “hinterland” in the area of gay rights.
She also suggested the SNP would “probably throw Nicola under the bus”, arguing that Ms Sturgeon had become an “embarrassment to the party”.
Ms Cherry, a longstanding critic of Ms Sturgeon’s failed gender reforms and a former justice spokesman for the SNP, made the remarks during a podcast recording with broadcaster Iain Dale.
Ms Sturgeon had appeared on the same show on Saturday while promoting the paperback edition of her memoir, Frankly, and said Ms Cherry had an “unrequited obsession” with her.
Asked whether she had read Ms Cherry’s own book, Ms Sturgeon replied: “One of the things that distresses me most the older I get is that realisation of all of the books I’ll never get to read. Why on earth would I spend time reading one that’s s***?”
Joanna Cherry said Nicola Sturgeon ‘flirts and teases us with the idea that she might be a lesbian’ but had no ‘hinterland’ in gay rights
Ms Cherry’s book, Keeping the Dream Alive, claims there was a plot among Ms Sturgeon’s allies to destroy Alex Salmond’s reputation in case he tried to replace her in a comeback.
Asked for her reaction, Ms Cherry said: ‘If I’m speaking in public, I would have enough manners not to use that sort of language, no matter how strongly I might disagree with someone.’
She suggested Ms Sturgeon was ‘finding the pressure too much’ after falling out with SNP colleagues for criticising John Swinney in an update to her memoir.
Ms Cherry said: ‘Nicola Sturgeon doesn’t want to address the detail of the criticisms I have made of her over the years and in my book, and the way she gets around doing that is, whenever my name is mentioned, she says something reasonably rude about me.
‘I’d like to reassure her that I have no interest in her beyond thinking it’s very important for Scotland and my former political party and the independence movement to analyse what has gone wrong over the last ten years, to look carefully at the various scandals that have happened, and to address them so that we can all move on.’
In her book, Ms Sturgeon said she had ‘never considered sexuality, my own included, to be binary’.
Ms Cherry told the audience at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre: ‘As she flirts and teases us with the idea that she might be a lesbian, what I would say to her is, You need to think about what you owe the generations of lesbians and gay men who fought so it was acceptable in this country, Scotland and the United Kingdom, to be gay and to have equal rights.
‘To realise our protections under the Equalities Act are just as important as those of trans people.’
In her memoir update, Ms Sturgeon said the SNP’s Holyrood election campaign lacked ‘vision or big-picture thinking’ under Mr Swinney, triggering a bout of infighting.
Ms Cherry, who is no longer in the SNP, said: ‘It’s astonishing because John Swinney has been so loyal to her.
Ms Sturgeon, 56, said Ms Cherry ‘seems to have an obsession with me that is not reciprocated’ at an Edinburgh Fringe show on Saturday
‘John Swinney’s got himself into all sorts of contortions defending her and defending the fact that she couldn’t have known what her husband [SNP embezzler Peter Murrell] was up to, despite the fact that she was the leader of the party and his boss.
‘John has spent a lot of political capital defending Nicola.
‘She’s criticised two of the heirs apparent – [education secretary] Mairi McAllan and [deputy First Minister] Jenny Gilruth are within her little coven of sisters that meet up.
‘I wondered if she was positioning herself to perhaps resign from the SNP before she’s pushed, because she’s becoming an embarrassment to the party, and that chapter was about positioning herself to follow a different path. That’s just my bit of speculation.’
Ms Cherry, an MP from 2015 to 2024, said she would ‘consider’ standing again for election, but added: ‘I have no political ambitions in the foreseeable future.’
She said Holyrood was ‘parochial’, not by definition, but because of the MSPs in it.
The SNP and Ms Sturgeon’s spokesman were asked for comment.
