Tag: Nicola Sturgeon

Sorting Ukraine in a day and blasting Meghan: 7 things we learned in Trump’s Farage interview

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LONDON — Frost/Nixon it was not. But at least the golf course got a good plug.
Brexit firebrand Nigel Farage bagged a half an hour sit-down interview with Donald Trump on Wednesday as part of the former U.S. president’s trip to his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland.
The hardball questions just kept on coming as the two men got stuck into everything from how great Trump is to just how massively he’s going to win the next election.
POLITICO tuned in to the GB News session so you didn’t have to.
Trump could end the Ukraine war in 24 hours
Trump sees your complex, grinding, war in Ukraine and raises you the deal-making credentials he honed having precisely one meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
“If I were president, I will end that war in one day — it’ll take 24 hours,” the ex-POTUS declared. And he added: “That deal would be easy.”
Time for a probing follow-up from the host to tease out the precise details of Trump’s big plan? Over to you Nige! “I think we’d all love to see that war stop,” the hard-hitting host beamed.
Nicola Sturgeon bad, Sean Connery great
Safe to say Scotland’s former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon — who quit a few months back and whose ruling Scottish National Party now faces the biggest crisis of its time at the top — is not on Trump’s Christmas card list.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever met her,” Trump said. “I’m not sure that I ever met her.” But he knew one thing for certain. Sturgeon “didn’t love Scotland” and has no respect for people who come to the country and spend “a lot of money.” Whoever could he mean?
One Scot did get a thumbs-up though. Sean Connery, who backed Trump’s golf course and was therefore “great, a tough guy.”
Boris Johnson was a far-leftist
Boris Johnson’s big problem? Not the bevy of scandals that helped call time on the beleaguered Conservative British prime minister, that’s for sure.
Instead, Trump reckons it was Johnson’s latter-day conversion to hard-left politics, which went shamefully unreported on by every single British political media outlet at the time. “They really weren’t staying Conservative,” he said of Johnson’s government. “They were … literally going far left. It never made sense.”
Joe Biden isn’t coming to King Charles’ coronation because he’s asleep?
Paging the royals: Turns out Joe Biden — who is sending First Lady Jill Biden to King Charles’ coronation this weekend — won’t be there because he is … catching some Zs. “He’s not running the country. He’s now in Delaware, sleeping,” Trump said.
Don’t worry, though: Trump explained how Biden’s government is actually being run by “a very smart group of Marxists or communists, or whatever you want to call them.” Johnson should hang out with those guys!
Meghan Markle ain’t getting a Christmas card either
Trump found time to wade into Britain’s never-ending culture war over the royals, ably assisted by a totally-straight-bat question from Farage who said Britain would be “better off without” Prince Harry turning up to the weekend festival of flag-waving.
Harry’s wife Meghan Markle has, Trump said, been “very disrespectful to the queen, frankly,” and there was “just no reason to do that.” Harry, whose tell-all memoir recently rocked the royals, “said some terrible things” in a book that was “just horrible.”
But do you know one person who really, really respected the queen? Donald J. Trump, who “got to know her very well over the last couple of years” and revealed he once asked her who her favorite president was.
Trump didn’t get an answer, he told Farage — but we’re sure he had one in mind.
Trump’s golf course really is just absolutely brilliant
Only got half an hour with the indicted former leader of the free world now leading the Republican pack for 2024? Better keep those questions tight!
Happily, Farage got the key stuff in, remarking on how “unbelievable” Trump’s Turnberry golf course is, and how it slots neatly into “the best portfolio of golf courses anyone has ever owned.”
“We come here from this golf course,” Farage helpfully told Trump, from the golf course. “You turned this golf course around. It’s now the No. 1 course in the whole of Britain and Europe. You’ve got this magnificent hotel. You must have missed this place?”
Trump, it turns out, certainly had missed the place. He is, after all, a man with “very powerful ideas on golf and where it should go.” A news ticker reminded us Turnberry is the No. 1 rated golf course in Europe.
Legal troubles? What legal troubles?
A couple of minutes still on the clock, Farage danced delicately around Trump’s recent courtroom drama, saying he had never seen the former president “looking so dejected” as when he sat before the Manhattan Criminal Court last month.
Trump predicted the drama would “go away immediately” if he wasn’t running for president. But he made clear there are still some burning issues keeping him going: Namely, taking on the “sick, horrible people” hounding him through the courts and relitigating the 2020 election result.
In an actual flash of tension, Farage delicately suggested Trump won in 2016 by tapping into voters’ concerns rather than reeling off his own grievances. “You brought this up,” the former president shot back.
At least they ended it on a positive note. Trump said a vote for him in 2024 would “get rid of crime — because our cities, Democrat-run, are crime-infested rat holes.” Unlike Trump Turnberry, which is the No. 1 rated golf course in Europe!

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#Sorting #Ukraine #day #blasting #Meghan #learned #Trumps #Farage #interview
( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

April 28, 2023
Funding, forensics – and a fridge freezer? The investigation into the SNP

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It should have been Humza Yousaf’s political honeymoon as first minister. The new leader of the Scottish National party has barely been leading Scotland for a month yet any plans to focus on policy agenda have been thrown into chaos as he firefights questions over a police investigation that has led to the party’s former chief executive Peter Murrell and its ex-treasurer Colin Beattie to be arrested.
As part of the fraud investigation into more than £600,000 donated to the party to help them run an independence campaign, an incident tent was set up in the home Nicola Sturgeon shares with her husband, Murrell, and a motor home seized from outside her mother in law’s house.
With reports that the police are investigating whether the money was spent on items including a motor home – and even a fridge freezer – onlookers have been left wondering how a party that so recently looked all-conquering is unravelling so fast.
The Guardian’s Scotland correspondent, Libby Brooks, explains what the investigation is really about, and tells Hannah Moore, how SNP members feel now. She looks at whether the party’s rapid growth in membership has affected its financial management – and how Yousaf is reacting.
• This article was amended on 27 April 2023 to correct the spelling of Humza Yousaf’s first name.

Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA
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#Funding #forensics #fridge #freezer #investigation #SNP
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

April 27, 2023
Nicola Sturgeon’s best photo ops: in pictures

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August 2022
Nicola Sturgeon takes part in a mask-making craft activity with Lily Orr (left) and Lily Sinclair, (right), both aged 7, during a visit to Lowson Memorial Church Free Breakfast Club in Forfar, to meet volunteers who deliver the service and discuss cost of living concerns with families who are using the facility
Photograph: Getty Images
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#Nicola #Sturgeons #photo #ops #pictures
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

February 16, 2023
Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation: the end of an era for Scotland – podcast

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Nicola Sturgeon has announced her resignation after more than eight years as first minister of Scotland and leader of the Scottish National party.
“Essentially, I’ve been trying to answer two questions: is carrying on right for me? And more importantly, is me carrying on right for the country, for my party and for the independence cause I have devoted my life to?” Sturgeon said at a press conference at Bute House in Edinburgh.
Severin Carrell, the Guardian’s Scotland editor, tells Hannah Moore why he believes Sturgeon chose this moment to step down. At the press conference, Sturgeon said her party was “awash with talented individuals”. Carrell discusses who is likely to succeed her, and what her departure means for the SNP and the Scottish independence movement.

Photograph: Getty Images
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#Nicola #Sturgeons #resignation #era #Scotland #podcast
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

February 16, 2023
Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon quits

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Nicola Sturgeon is resigning as Scotland’s first minister in a move that stunned her pro-independence party and fired the starting pistol on the race to succeed her.
The Scottish National Party leader — who has led the party and the country’s devolved government since 2014 — made the shock announcement at a hastily arranged press conference Wednesday from her official residence in Edinburgh.
Citing the personal toll of the job and a desire to “free” her party to pick its own Scottish independence strategy, Sturgeon, 52, said it had been a “privilege beyond measure” to serve as first minister.
But she confirmed she had asked the SNP’s top brass to “begin the process of electing a new party leader” in the coming days.
Sturgeon will, she said, “remain in office until my successor is elected,” but made clear she believed it was now the “right time” to move on.
“I am proud to stand here as the first female and longest serving incumbent of this office, and I’m very proud of what has been achieved in the years I’ve been in Bute House,” she said.
“However, since my very first moments in the job, I have believed that part of serving well would be to know almost instinctively when the time is right to make way for someone else. And when that time came to have the courage to do so, even if — to many across the country and in my party — it might feel too soon.”
Sturgeon — a vocal opponent of Brexit who has argued that Britain’s departure from the bloc warrants another Scottish independence referendum — is the longest-serving Scottish first minister, and has led her party to successive election victories there.

She remains one of the most popular figures in the drive to separate Scotland from the United Kingdom through a fresh referendum.
But the SNP leader has been embroiled in a row with the British government in recent weeks, after it blocked a bill aimed at reforming Scotland’s gender self-declaration laws. She has also been under fire over the housing of a convicted rapist, who changed their gender, in a women’s prison. That decision was later reversed.
Sturgeon denied that her exit was “a reaction to short-term pressures,” saying her near three decades in frontline politics had toughened her to “navigating choppy waters.”
Instead, she said, the move had come from “a deeper and longer term assessment” of her ability to give the top job its all, as well as a desire not to bind the party’s hands as it mulls its strategy for securing another independence referendum.
Personal and political
Sturgeon has long argued for the next Westminster general election to be used as a de facto referendum on Scottish independence, but with a crucial SNP conference aimed at hashing out an independence strategy slated for next month, the outgoing first minister said she wanted her party to be free “to choose the path that it believes to be the right one, without worrying about the perceived implications for my leadership.”
While Sturgeon stressed she was “not expecting violins,” she also cited the toll of leading Scotland through the COVID-19 pandemic, and said a first minister “is never off duty.”
Sturgeon pointed out that she had been a member of the Scottish Parliament since the age of 29, and in government since the age of 37.
“I’ve literally done this in one capacity or another for all of my life,” she said. “I’ve been Nicola Sturgeon the politician for all of my life.” Now, she said, she could perhaps spend “a little bit of time on Nicola Sturgeon, the human being.”
‘Civil war’
An SNP official said the news had “completely taken aback” staff at the party’s headquarters — and predicted “the beginning of a bitter civil war and factional splits on the next level” in the wake of her exit.
“This is just a completely wild situation,” they said ahead of the conference. “Literally nobody at HQ, even at senior levels — apart from [Sturgeon’s husband and SNP Chief Executive] Peter Murrell, I presume – was briefed.”
The SNP’s ruling national executive committee will set out a leadership election timetable “over the coming days,” Sturgeon said.
Sturgeon succeeded Alex Salmond as first minister in 2014 after the SNP failed in its first referendum bid to take Scotland out of the United Kingdom.
The pair later fell out spectacularly as Salmond faced sexual assault charges, of which he was cleared after a two-week trial.
This developing story is being updated. Emilio Casalicchio and Matt Honeycombe-Foster contributed reporting.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

February 15, 2023