Joanna Cherry’s post-Westminster reinvention is beginning to look less like conviction and more like choreography. Her upcoming memoir, Keeping the Dream Alive, shares its name with a late-80s pop ballad by the German band Freiheit, a one-hit wonder whose brief moment in the charts was followed by decades of silence. The comparison feels apt. Cherry’s record in politics was much the same: one big hit during the SNP’s rise, followed by a long fade-out, punctuated only by the occasional comeback act.
While she was in office, Cherry was the picture of loyalty. Her social media feed reads like a scrapbook of party unity: smiling beside Nicola Sturgeon at Creative Scotland events, celebrating government announcements, dutifully defending the SNP line. Only after losing her seat did she begin to discover her “independence of thought,” repackaging herself as the conscience of a party she never once publicly defied while it mattered.
Now she’s back with a book deal and a new story to sell. Keeping the Dream Alive promises “information not yet in the public domain” and a defence of Alex Salmond. But the revelation is repetition. Cherry has been running this line since 2020, positioning herself as the loyal dissident - the insider who saw too much and said too little. Her claim to clear Salmond’s name is less whistleblowing than rebranding.
The timing is calculated. The memoir lands weeks before the Holyrood election, perfectly placed to guarantee headlines when the cameras are rolling. She no longer sits in Parliament, but she’s determined to stay in the conversation. Keeping the Dream Alive keeps her name alive too, another chance to rewrite her part in Scotland’s most divisive political decade.
As political comebacks go, it’s pure Freiheit: one brief hit, followed by years of awkward silence, and now a remix nobody asked for. Whatever case Cherry hopes to make for Salmond’s vindication, the public seems to have moved on. Nicola Sturgeon was recently voted Scotland’s most significant politician of the past 30 years by a wide margin. Salmond placed a distant second. The dream Cherry is keeping alive might not be the nation’s, but her own.
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