NICOLA Sturgeon has warned John Swinney that the SNP risk losing more votes to the Scottish Greens under the party’s current policy direction.
The former first minister said Swinney was “lucky” the Greens didn’t field more candidates, as they could have made the SNP’s election result worse.
At the election in May 2026, the SNP returned 58 MSPs compared to 64 in 2021, while the Scottish Greens doubled their number of Holyrood politicians from seven to 15.
It comes as the SNP under Swinney have taken a different direction on oil and gas than during Sturgeon’s tenure.
While the former first minister said that Cambo, an oil field off the coast of Shetland, should not go ahead, her successor Swinney and other politicians in the SNP have been calling for more drilling in the North Sea.
Sturgeon was also critical of Swinney’s pitch to voters at the last election, writing in a new 6000-word introduction to her memoir, Frankly, that it lacked “vision or big-picture thinking”.
The Scottish Sun reports that Sturgeon said the wider campaign was “detached from the big issues bearing down on people’s lives.”
Sturgeon wrote that it would be a “massive electoral blunder…for the SNP to soften its left-of-centre environmentalist credentials”.
It comes as the former SNP leader revealed she is writing a political thriller about a female First Minister with a “dark, sad secret in her past”, but insisted it was not autobiographical.
Sturgeon said she would disclose “what really goes on behind the scenes” drawing on her “insider knowledge of how governments actually work”.
“It involves a female First Minister with a dark, sad secret in her past,” she wrote. “The tabloids shouldn’t get too excited – it is not another autobiography.”
Sturgeon also reiterated that she was unaware of her estranged husband Peter Murrell’s crime spree between 2010 and 2022, which came to light after police began probing missing party funds as part of Operation Branchform.
She wrote that she was “completely cleared” by the police but “despite that exoneration…some were quick to point the finger of suspicion in my direction”.
It comes after Tory MP David Davis used parliamentary privilege to claim that Sturgeon was aware of Murrell’s £400,000 embezzlement, prompting a furious response from the former first minister.
In the new foreword, Sturgeon said she was “completely unaware of many of the items that were purchased”.
“To this day, I don’t know who or what they were bought for or where they went,” she wrote.
“Until it came up in the context of the police investigation in 2023, I did not even know that the infamous campervan existed.”
“To say I feel completely and utterly betrayed is an understatement,” Sturgeon added.
“It isn’t just that in committing these crimes he has lied to me and turned our lives upside down. That would be bad enough.
“But he has also exposed me to suspicion, humiliation and vilification. It is clear that in everything he did, and for whatever reason, he did not stop to think about me at all.”
Sturgeon also revealed she has no plans to come back to live in Scotland in the near future, saying that “a bit of temporary distance feels healthy”. She is currently living in London.
