If your poll rankings are tanking, your government is mired in sleaze and you can’t run a functioning health service, there’s only one thing for it: head to COP26 for a photoshoot. Leaders on both sides of the border have adopted this approach in recent days, with Boris Johnson heading to the eco-jamboree in a doomed attempt to ward off questions about Paterson-gate. But it’s Nicola Sturgeon’s attention-seeking antics which have caught Steerpike’s eye, given the amount of photos the First Minister has been posting all over Twitter.
Mr S of course was among the first to report on Sturgeon’s selfless summitry, just two days into into the fortnight-long farago of COP26. And now with the conference set to finish tomorrow, Steerpike has been totting up the number of pictures Scotland’s (apparently underworked) leader has found time to pose for. Despite her talk of ‘setting aside egos,’ the First Minister has posted or retweeted no less than 65 pictures or videos of herself on Twitter in the last nine days, bringing her grand COP total to 84 pictures in just eleven days. If narcissism were a source of renewable energy, COP might actually save the planet.
Alongside ‘interviewing’ actor Alan Cumming, gushing over Al Gore and touting whisky to the UN Secretary-General, Sturgeon also somehow found time to pose with a can of Irn Bru beside another always-online egotist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Presumably the Democratic congresswoman was the next best thing after New Zealand premier Jacinda Ardern publicly ignored Sturgeon’s numerous entreaties on Twitter.
Not all have been impressed by the First Minister’s antics though. Friends of the Earth Scotland have today released a damning statement on Sturgeon, criticising her for being snapped with youth climate activists such as Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate but then ‘refusing to join’ an alliance of countries aiming to phase out fossil fuels.
Still, with COP set to end tomorrow, Sturgeon will now have to return to the day job of fixing Scotland’s crumbling health service, mounting drug deaths, failing ferries and under-performing schools. Who can blame her for trying to milk the COP carnival for all its worth?
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