Voices: Keir Starmer has Nicola Sturgeon in his top pocket

Nicola Sturgeon is still the best politician in Britain. She became leader of the Scottish National Party and first minister of Scotland more than eight years ago, and she is still there.

She was briefly eclipsed by Boris Johnson, who broke the Brexit deadlock and won an improbable election – an election that the SNP helped to make possible, although that is another story – but he didn’t last.

Now she faces a new rival. Keir Starmer has turned out to be good at politics. Originally elected as a transitional leader – someone expected to start the long trudge back to electability, but not, perhaps, to be leader on arrival at the promised land – he is now the coming power. The sunflowers are turning to the new sun. Even in Scotland, the Labour Party is coming back to life and looking as if it might be relevant in future.

Because she is such a good politician, Sturgeon senses the threat. Hence the fighting talk in her interview with Lewis Goodall on The News Agents, a political podcast, on Friday. First, she paid Starmer the compliment of disappointment: “I had some good interactions with Keir over Brexit, and actually his position now is one of the reasons that I’ve lost a bit of respect for him.”

Aligning herself with the suppressed views of many Labour members, she criticised Starmer for triangulating and fudging over the EU: “He won’t even countenance going back into the EU or even the single market and the customs union.” Then she seamlessly linked this to Starmer’s party being “a pale imitation of a Tory government”.

This is the standard SNP line, but that it is what many Labour members fear is what makes it so effective. Especially in Scotland, where much of the SNP vote consists of former Labour supporters animated by opposition to the Conservatives: “He needs to have a bit more principle, a bit more difference, and actually a bit more guts to take on the Tories and to take on the right-wing media.”

The most interesting part, though, was what came next. You’ll come crawling to me, was her message to the Labour leader. “If he wants to govern, of course he needs to talk to the SNP, if we were to hold the balance of power,” she said.

Starmer said of the SNP in his conference speech in September: “We can’t work with them. We won’t work with them. No deal under any circumstances.” Her response: “I don’t believe Keir Starmer on that. I think if we get into this scenario, he will be biting the hand off the SNP leader to try to work together.”

She knows this isn’t true, but she is trying to create the impression of natural inevitability about Labour and the SNP working together in a hung parliament. She cannot admit it, but it is in her interest for the Conservatives to revive the image of Ed Miliband being in Alex Salmond’s top pocket. She wants them to photoshop Starmer into her top pocket.

It is in her interest for the Conservatives to continue in government, to continue to generate the anti-Tory sentiment that fuels the SNP charabanc, now stuttering alarmingly. The Tory warning of a “coalition of chaos” was effective in 2015, and is likely to be effective again. But even if it doesn’t work next time, she wants to maximise the SNP’s bargaining power in a hung parliament.

That is the other reason for talking up the idea that Starmer would be “biting the hand off” the SNP in his eagerness to work together. The more it seems the natural and right thing to do – especially to Labour supporters – the more leverage Stephen Flynn, the SNP leader in the House of Commons, would have (we note, in passing, that she didn’t name “the SNP leader”, who was not her preferred candidate for the role).

A good politician knows their enemy, and Sturgeon understands the Labour Party’s psychology. Its members are all for an anti-Tory alliance, which is why they are so keen on proportional representation.

Many of them are naive and romantic about an anti-Tory alliance with a party that wants to break up the UK, often because they do too. They are suckers for the soft argument that Scotland should have another referendum on independence if it wants one, to which the correct response is that of course it should if independence was the settled will of Scottish residents, which it isn’t.

Hence her comment to Goodall about Starmer: “He can oppose independence, but there’s many of his own party members here in Scotland – perhaps supporters more than members – that support independence, and even more who would absolutely think it is for the right of the Scottish people to choose.”

This trash talk is a brilliant attempt to compensate for the weakness of the SNP’s actual position in a hung parliament, which is currently the most likely outcome of the next election. Starmer knows full well that the SNP would have no choice but to allow him to govern at the head of a minority administration. The anti-Tory sentiment that sustains the SNP could not tolerate the party propping up Rishi Sunak.

What is more, as Peter Kellner says in Prospect magazine, once Starmer was installed in No 10, the SNP would continue to be powerless, because the Conservatives would be unwilling to bring the government down (fearing they would be punished by the voters for causing an unnecessary election). That is why Edward Heath’s Conservatives abstained in the vote on Harold Wilson’s Queen’s Speech in 1974.

Kellner points out that the situation has changed since 2015 because the repeal of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act means that the power to call an election has been restored to the prime minister. Whereas Ed Miliband as leader of a minority government would have been trapped by the act, Starmer would, like Wilson, be in charge of the timetable and looking to hold a second election when the prospects were favourable.

Sturgeon knows all this, too, which is why I think she will be off after the next election. Her tactic of pretending the election in Scotland will be a referendum on independence is likely to fail. Even if the pro-independence parties win more than 50 per cent of the vote – which is a demanding target – whoever is prime minister will just say “Now is not the time.”

Her tough-talking words about Starmer are a sign of weakness rather than strength. She may have met her match.