STEPHEN DAISLEY: Sturgeon’s stare so icy it set again world warming

Were you up for John Nicolson? It was 4.23am when the news came in that the grandest of all SNP MPs had lost his seat. 

If Scotland had a Portillo moment it was this, not only because Nicolson’s pristinely coiffured mane rivals that of the formerly fop-haired Tory grandee but because his notional majority was almost 13,000.

I squinted at the BBC‘s results table to inspect its outrageous conclusion, but the numbers added up. 

Nicolson had been unceremoniously dumped in favour of Labour. Perhaps it’s his regal manner but it was almost as if the electors of Alloa and Grangemouth had voted out the Queen Mother.

Mind you, I shouldn’t have been surprised by anything at this point in the proceedings. 

The evening began with the exit poll showing the Nationalists reduced to ten seats. Party strategists had set twenty as their benchmark for a respectable result. This wasn’t a bloody nose; it was an absolute skelping.

Over on ITV, rakish newsreader Tom Bradby had been paired with political editor Robert Peston, who had brought his sole facial expression: mildly confused basset hound.

The programme had lined up a rogues’ gallery of politicians to comment on events through the night, one a piece from Labour, the Tories and the SNP. 

There they sat, the three wise monkeys: Ed Balls, George Osborne and Nicola Sturgeon. See no evil, hear no evil, deleted all evil in line with Scottish Government policy.

Some Unionists considered it poor judgement on ITV’s part to hire Sturgeon as an election analyst. I totally agree. 

They put the woman who wrecked the SNP on telly and trained a camera on her all night as one SNP MP after another lost their seat — and they didn’t even think to make it pay per view.

As it was, we didn’t have to wait for any results for Sturgeon’s legendary glower to make an appearance. 

Around 11.45pm, ITV’s dogged Scotland correspondent Peter Smith popped up with some thoughts for the former first minister. 

Prompted by Bradby on the SNP’s apparent losses, he observed that ‘the architect’ of the strategy to make the election a de facto referendum on independence was ‘right there in the studio with you’, suggesting pointedly that she might wish to offer ‘some mea culpas’.

The camera cut to Sturgeon, who by this point looked like Rosa Klebb biting down on a cyanide pill.

‘I think Peter’s getting a wee bit over-excited there,’ she sneered, before adding that his analysis was ‘not unexpected’.

From behind a curled lip, she made things personal: ‘I’ve got a feeling he’s had that pent up in him for some time.’

This is how Sturgeon operates: she’s spits out insinuations at journalists who displease her then magnanimously calls for respect for the media after the inevitable cybernat pile-on. 

Strip away the selfie-taking, the novel recommendations and the Loose Women bonhomie and she’s just a nasty piece of work.

Oh, and her much-awaited analysis of her party’s meltdown? It wasn’t her constitution-centric strategy but the failure to link independence to ‘people’s day-to-day lives’. 

I suspect people made that link themselves and voted accordingly.

I flipped over to BBC One around 12.30am, where the inevitable Kirsty Wark was hosting Scottish Government minister Shirley-Anne Somerville, Tory MSP Liz Smith, Scottish Labour deputy leader Jackie Baillie, and former Lib Dem chief Jo Swinson. 

I have no problem with an all-female panel but someone’s probably reported it to Police Scotland as a hate crime.

How to describe Somerville’s face as she processed the SNP’s horrendous losses? ‘Shell shocked’ doesn’t quite cover it.

She looked like someone who had turned up for her first day in a new job and the job was head of safety at Chernobyl. 

The no-nonsense Smith was bracingly candid. The Tories had ‘let down the country’. 

Citing Partygate and Liz Truss’s premiership as the two events which inflicted the most damage, she admitted: ‘I was personally sitting with my head in my hands.’

Baillie, meanwhile, was turned out in comradely red and warning against ‘getting carried away’ on the strength of what were still forecast results. What a political operator. Only Jackie Baillie could brief against an exit poll.

Back on Sky News, it was 1.20am and Kay Burley announced that she’d ‘cracked open the Percy Pigs’. 

Ruth Davidson, Sky’s resident Tory pundit, spotted Ed Davey walking into his count on the live feed. ‘I sort of expected him to jet ski in,’ she quipped.

An accidental elbow on the remote then took me to BBC Alba. Don’t have a Scooby what they were saying but, fun fact: the Gaelic for ‘Brexit referendum’ is… ‘Brexit referendum’.

Jim Murphy — remember him? — was suddenly on the BBC panel, sporting a white checked blazer over black crew neck and a pair of unmissable horn-rimmed glasses, looking like he’d run away from The Proclaimers to become a software engineer. 

He beamed as he pointed out that Blair McDougall had taken Labour from third to first place in his old seat, East Renfrewshire.

Speaking of The Proclaimers, the SNP losses were coming in thick and fast now. 

David Linden no more, Kirsten Oswald no more, Alyn Smith no more, Hannah Bardell no more. I should have watched this down the local cinema. I ran out of popcorn by half eleven.

Back on ITV, talk had turned to how the Greens were taking some votes from Labour on the left, with Sturgeon chipping in that there was a lesson for her party following the breaking of the Bute House Agreement.

‘I would have stuck with the Greens,’ she said.

‘What your successors have done is so frustrating isn’t it?’ Balls taunted.

‘You’re not going to bait me, Ed,’ she shot back.

You know, for a supposed opponent of Westminster, she looked pretty happy rubbing shoulders with Tory and Labour big wigs.

Asked to muse on what Swinney should do now, Sturgeon warned against ‘falling into the trap’ of ‘moving to the right’, adding: ‘The SNP has to re-establish trust on some of the core competence-in-government issues.’

Boy, if she ever finds out who lost that trust…

The clock struck three and Channel Four brought us Sir Keir Starmer giving his victory speech in Holborn and St Pancras, with the sundry protest candidates lined up beside him. 

As the new prime minister vowed ‘an end to the politics of performance’, there stood next to him a man dressed as Elmo from Sesame Street (19 votes), applauding the sentiment.

To Lothian East, where Douglas Alexander romped home with a stonking 13,000-vote majority. That wasn’t his greatest feat. 

Last time we saw him, losing to Mhairi Black in 2015, he was 47. Now he’s 56 and doesn’t look a day older. 

Going by his suspiciously inky barnet, I’m guessing it’s less portrait in the attic and more Just For Men in the bathroom cabinet.

We shot up to Aberdeen South, where a sombre-looking Stephen Flynn clung on, telling the count: ‘When you’re knocked down, you get back up again.’ 

A decent speech but I think Chumbawamba did it better. Down in Clacton, Nigel Farage swept to victory and promised to attract tourists to the area. 

So much for cracking down on immigration. Barely an MP for thirty seconds and already he wanted to bring more foreigners in.

Just after 4am, John Swinney was admitting to the BBC’s Martin Geissler that his party had been ‘disunited’. See, even the SNP’s better together. 

To be honest, I felt a pang of pathos as a grim-faced Swinney attempted to spin his party’s catastrophic results while counting centre staff folded up tables and put chairs away behind him. Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first send metaphors.

Returning to ITV, Bradby remarked that, unlike all the Cabinet ministers being turfed out, Sturgeon had left of her own volition. 

Then, in an aside all the more brutal for having been delivered with impeccable politeness, he noted: ‘Obviously you’ve had a rough time since, but we can’t talk about that.’ 

There’s a first for British politics. An election night pundit having to be reminded of their right to remain silent.

For Sturgeon, the worst was yet to come. For the rest of us, it made staying up to 5am worth it.

Joanna Cherry, fresh from losing her seat, was beamed in from Edinburgh. The screen split between her and Sturgeon. 

The tension fizzled through the screen. I winced, but I wasn’t remotely prepared for what came next. 

Cherry summoned every ounce of contempt in her body and drenched her former leader in a torrent of disdain. 

She blamed ‘a lack of debate… under Nicola’s leadership’, when ‘our suggestions were not well received’ and there was ‘a style of leadership that didn’t brook debate’.

By this point my toes had curled so far they were practically touching my calves. Cherry showed not a speck of warmth towards Sturgeon, who repaid her with a stare so icy that it probably set global warming back a decade.

‘I would point out that Joanna’s three election victories were all delivered under my leadership,’ she spat.

I’m not sure what motivated Sturgeon to subject herself to this all-night indignity. If it wasn’t money, it can only have been masochism.

In the end, the SNP limped home with just nine MPs. At least they can all fit in a camper van now.