Nicola Sturgeon has tried to blame prison chiefs for trans rapist Isla Bryson being sent to a women’s jail.
The former First Minister hit out at the Scottish Prison Service for the way it handled the case and said she ‘lost the dressing room’ over the issue.
In her autobiography the SNP MSP, who had just a month earlier had pushed through controversial gender reform legislation, claimed she was ‘completely blindsided’ when the Bryson case sparked a public outcry.
She said: ‘I had no advance warning that the case was pending. To this day, I don’t understand how it could be that no one in the Scottish Prison Service or Scottish government officialdom thought it important to flag it up to me.
‘It isn’t for a First Minister to decide which prison an individual goes to, as this is an operational matter, but with some advance warning I could have been ready to explain, and hopefully calm, the situation. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered, the damage might have been done anyway, but at least I could have tried.’
