We know Nicola Sturgeon will stand down next year. But don't write her off just yet
Nicola Sturgeon must be sick of the sight of her own obituaries. Since she confirmed on Wednesday that she will not seek re-election as a MSP at next May's Holyrood elections, ending a 27-year career in frontline politics, the Scottish media has overflowed with assessments of the legacy and greatest hits of the country's first female and longest serving first minister.
Although the decision came as no surprise, given her increasingly infrequent appearances at the Scottish parliament, her departure seems a good time to consider what she did and the imprint she has left on the recent history and future trajectory of her country.
Having reported on Sturgeon for over a decade, I remember the deafening roars of the crowd at Glasgow's 12,000-seater Hydro arena, which she sold out in 2014 – like Lady Gaga and Beyoncé – a few weeks after her election as SNP leader. I remember a round table on energy policy, where she made sure that the only young woman in the room got a chance to speak. I remember her reddening face and wobbly lip last year as she struggled to contain her emotion under questioning at the UK Covid-19 inquiry.
An introvert with down-to-earth charm, she was – and still is among many in the SNP and the wider Scottish public – adored, a progressive ally and advocate in private as well as public. Her greatest gift is the ability to speak human when all around her just look to be touting for votes.
At the age of 54 – with eight years on our prime minister and still relatively young in terms of political careers – talk of legacy can feel premature. It is certainly fluid, with the Branchform inquiry into SNP finances, which saw her arrested a few months after she resigned as first minister in 2023, ongoing and her soon to be ex-husband, Peter Murrell, charged with alleged embezzlement.
Since her announcement, posted on her current favoured social media platform, Instagram, the Holyrood opposition has taken the opportunity to cast her legacy as one dominated by division and failure. But that is less than half the story.
Certainly Sturgeon benefited electorally from the Yes/No split that followed the 2014 referendum, with independence voters uniting behind the SNP, and supporters of the union split between other parties. It took another 10 years for the link between constitutional preference and ballot box to uncouple, resulting in the SNP's catastrophic defeat in last July's general election at the hands of a resurgent Scottish Labour. (Since then, Labour has squandered its advantage and the SNP is leading the polls for Holyrood again.)
But her own political standing suffered because of that same division – those who loved her were unwilling to hold her to account, while those who loathed her refused to acknowledge her many assets.
It was this capacity to polarise that Sturgeon herself identified as one of her reasons for stepping down as first minister. But it was plain that she was also spent after a gruelling run of challenges, including the Covid pandemic, the Holyrood inquiry into the Scottish government's handling of sexual assault allegations against her predecessor Alex Salmond, and the controversy around her flagship gender recognition reforms.
Throughout the pandemic, Sturgeon was admired across the UK for her straightforward and reassuring communication, yet the UK Covid inquiry exposed a significant lack of transparency behind this, bypassing cabinet decision-making and mass deletion of informal messages. It underlined her hyper-controlled, presidential style of leadership and its brutal self-imposed toll, with Sturgeon unable to allow herself even a day off.
With the Salmond inquiry – as with her husband and former SNP chief executive Murrell – some felt a woman was being unfairly held responsible for the alleged actions of a man – but self-evidently this woman was also in charge of her government and at the epicentre of party decision-making for decades. Likewise, both she and Murrell failed to recognise the almighty potential conflict that having a married couple at the head of a governing party represented.
She was badly hurt by accusations of betraying feminism over her gender recognition reforms, which she could not have foreseen would coalesce around a global culture war when she first proposed them as a natural progression from the introduction of equal marriage. But her refusal to entertain those, even within her own party, worried about the potential scope of self-identification left her exposed.
Sturgeon herself has said the introduction of the Scottish child payment, the expansion of free childcare and support for youngsters in care are among her proudest achievements. Critics point to failures to tackle the attainment gap or drug deaths, timidity in taking on vested interests over NHS reform, and also her unwillingness to build on the broad coalition gifted by the Yes movement after the referendum.
Something that even admirers of Sturgeon have always wrestled with was the space between rhetoric and reality in the SNP government – or, as an anti-poverty campaigner said to me: 'Does it matter that witches have been pardoned if you don't know what you're going to feed your child tomorrow?' Despite some excellent policy progress on violence against women and child poverty, for example, third sector leaders would highlight a significant implementation gap: like the extended childcare, which ended up a postcode lottery, with extra hours at work-unfriendly times.
Speaking to younger activists, it's clear that the sheer symbolism of Sturgeon's tenure inspired generations. Her legacy is as much in what she made visible and normal. She proved it was possible to govern in an entirely different tone of voice from the Tory bombast at Westminster: speaking out against Trump, happily describing herself as a feminist, championing the transformative power of reading. She spoke too about miscarriage, the menopause, fostering – and while having a political leader talk about those topics on Loose Women is not a silver bullet to systemic inequality, it mattered.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the first of her kind would end up unable to fulfil the weight of expectation. It is worth keeping in mind too that the party she led is united by its desire for independence, not centre-left social policy.
For now, Sturgeon's Instagram followers can see her enjoying the 'ordinary stuff that most people take for granted', which she referenced in her resignation speech as having become increasingly out of her reach. Although for Sturgeon this involves hanging out with the tartan A-list, DJing with Hollywood star Alan Cumming and hosting books events with her old pal and crime-writing doyenne Val McDermid.
Meanwhile, those obituary writers – me included – await the publication of her 'deeply personal' memoir later this year with some anticipation about the revelations it may contain. I doubt these will be the last words to be written about a woman who continues to fascinate, infuriate, inspire and challenge even as she steps – for now – out of the limelight.
Libby Brooks writes on Scotland for the Guardian
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Booze, wood-burners, Sunday roasts... as the list of everyday pleasures targeted by the SNP grows longer, have we EVER been subjected to a more censorious nanny state government?
They've clobbered smokers. Thought – aloud – about criminalising the ownership of cats. Its Fife panjandrums are now leaning on local chippies to slash portion-sizes – in the averred interests of public health: now, SNP surrogates threaten your Sunday roast. The ink had barely dried on the first Scottish Parliament minutes before that first cohort of MSPs had banned fox-hunting and hare-coursing. Passed a whole Act about dog-fouling. Our underemployed, overwaged legislators are still after anyone gasping for a fag - in the latest wheeze, you can now be prosecuted for puffing within fifteen metres of a hospital boundary, even if you are on the other side of the street. Disposable vapes are in their sights too: for years it has been an offence to vape at any Scottish railway station, even on a platform in the open air. No pleasure seems safe from the Nats, from their fatuous efforts to police football chants – indeed, the initial law was so intrusive, and so unworkable, it had to be abandoned. Forget that soothing drink, by the way. 'Minimum pricing,' whacked up again last year, means you're now shelling out more for a litre of sherry than, back in 1999, you had to hand over for a bottle of Famous Grouse. Our English neighbours enjoy cheaper beer than we do. And now the Nats have a real new beef with us. The Scottish Government's Climate Change Committee, wagging a sententious finger, says we should all be eating 30 per cent less red meat. And that farmers – as if they did not have trials enough, with scant profit-margins and over-weening bureaucracy in one of Scotland's loneliest jobs – should rear a third fewer sheep and cattle. Even that shocker has had to jostle for attention with other ridiculous headlines. NHS Fife, for instance, is leaning on the hot takeaway trade to cut the typical portion of, for instance, fish and chips. And the Scottish Animal Welfare Commission suddenly has anglers in its crosshairs. Fishing practices should be reformed, it drones, as fish are 'sentient beings' with 'emotional experiences that matter to them.' It hopes ministers will soon review the law regarding 'actions that occur in the normal course of fishing.' Such a move, panted one newspaper and as if it had just unmasked Lord Lucan, 'could outlaw many aspects of angling such as hooking a fish and removing it from the water.' SAWC does, admittedly, have form. Only in February, it thought about forbidding cat ownership in parts of the country where there was demonstrable predation on birds and small mammals. It would make still more sense to shoot every last bird of prey out of the sky and, if SAWC wants a rough guide, between 1837 and 1840 gamekeepers in forested Invergarry killed 285 common buzzards, 63 goshawks, 27 white-tailed sea eagles, 15 golden eagles and 18 ospreys. Not to mention six gyrfalcons, eleven hobbies, 275 kites, 371 rough-legged buzzards, 462 kes-trels, 78 merlins, 63 hen harriers and seven orange-legged falcons. The First Minister, of less stern stuff, limply assured the public that the SNP administration had no plans to ban pet cats. Last year, too, the Nationalists were even forced to abandon a crazed scheme to ban wood-burning stoves in new-build houses. It feels increasingly as if you cannot take three strides in what one of John Swinney's predecessors once hailed as 'the best small country in the world' without being lectured, harangued, re-proached and disapproved of. Tobacco, sugar, booze, salmon or that jumbo-sausage supper… ministers have their beady little eyes on us. And, no doubt, others have eyes on them too. It is only fair to point out that this culture of censure, rebuke and righteously rapped knuckles long predates the SNP's 2007 ascent to power. From practically the start, the devolved new Scotland rapidly won much wry comment for eat-your-vegetables nanny statism. After the first MSPs had solemnly voted themselves a com-memorative medal. In 2005, for instance, Nora Radcliffe – Liberal Democrat MSP for Gordon, till Alex Salmond toppled her from obscurity into oblivion – called for a ban on the boiling of live lobsters. The Scottish Executive, as it then was, pelted us with posters and raucous TV ads about the horrors of everything from eating too many crisps, through dodgy electric blankets, to the enormity of consigning your Christmas turkey to the fridge before it was completely cold. And, in April 2006 and to widespread trepidation – many journalists hurried up from England, hoping for riots on the streets – Jack McConnell's administration banned smoking in enclosed public spaces. A policy, in fact, first suggested by a Nationalist MSP, Stewart Maxwell. But Scots submitted to it so meekly that one wonders how much it emboldened another First Minister, fourteen years later, to impose all sorts of ridiculous restrictions on our liberties during Covid. At its height, you could not sit down on a park bench, enjoy coffee with a neighbour in your garden or leave your house more than once a day. It was even decreed an offence to venture beyond the bounds of your own local authority. When I in March 2021 had briefly to scamper back to my Hebridean lair, by deserted roads through silent towns, for an armful of Astra-Zeneca, I was so terrified of being stopped and challenged I carried a sort of letter-of-transit from my GP. 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And, in 1907, a United Free Church minister assailed a new social phenomenon as 'perfect iniquities of Hell itself,' capped in Glasgow Corporation's 1909 roar about 'the great and increasing evil' it was doing to the city's young men and women. Business ventures 'owned by 'aliens and Roman Catholics,' touting an unnecessary product 'epitomising,' gasped one gentleman, 'the evil of luxury being smuggled into the souls of Glaswegians.' The target of such ire? Italian ice cream cafés. As if not to be outdone, the Free Presbyterian Magazine warned young Highland lasses, seeking urban employment, of the perils of the white-slave trade. They should not, for instance, accept sweets from strangers. Retreating from such past larks to the latest decrees from those with the rule over us, it is striking how few stand up to logical examination. Take the Scottish Climate Committee's clamour for less beef and fewer cows; the reduced bleating of sheep. This is presumably pegged to three core tenets of tree-hugging faith: that reduced upland grazing will in scant decades see the regeneration of much Scottish forest; that cattle-feed is a wildly inefficient use of grain; and that cows, naturally flatulent, are responsible for about 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse gases. The precise figure is, in fact, disputed. But the Committee's lordly loftiness flies in the face of basic realities. For one, about 65 per cent of all the land in Britain can bear nothing but grass. Cows and sheep – hold the front page – eat grass. We cannot. Our cloven-hooved stock will, accordingly, be an essential part of our food economy till the end of time, and the beef industry in particular has for years been working hard to reduce its carbon footprint. For another, much of upland and coastal Scotland is too high – or too exposed to salted winds – to bear significant woodland. 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It remains official NatureScot advice to smash dead any American signal crayfish you meet in our fresh waters and, for over two decades, it has been determinedly exterminating feral mink in the Western Isles. Where SWAC may have a point is the dubious practice of 'catch and release.' My own view is that you should only venture out with the rod for fish you can eat and, having caught your salmon and thumped it on the head, you head for home and the deep freeze, rather than hauling in fish after fish, weighing them, measuring them, taking a few snaps for social media and then returning them to the deep. Not forgetting a protracted chat about emotional experiences that really mattered to them. But, in coarse fishing, catch and release is the whole point: we might, perhaps, command barbless hooks, or even the soluble sort decreed in the pursuit of bluefin tuna. The wild Atlantic salmon may not always be with us; the typical Scottish political animal will add to the gaiety of nations for decades to come. Bossy, virtue-signalling, carefully picking its targets, and unconsciously living what Ronald Reagan once mocked as the prevalent tenets in modern statecraft. If it moves, tax it; if it keeps moving, regulate it – and, if it stops moving, subsidise it.
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STEPHEN DAISLEY: Baillie grinned like the cat who got the cream...and sent the milkman to A&E
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JIM SILLARS: SNP settled for mediocrity and paid the price with this result
The by-election: two winners, one major casualty and a lot of questions answered. Against a background of anger in a 'Broken Britain' alongside 18 years of a SNP government (the last ten seeing ferry fiascos, a failing NHS, declarations of a housing emergency without emergency action, falling school standards and more time spent politically on trans identity and dodging the definition of a woman than on child poverty) the electorate in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse gave their verdict. There is a sea change taking place in UK and Scottish life. People have had enough of the virtue signallers; they are fed up with lectures about what they can and cannot say; they have come to despise spin as a substitute for action; they are no longer afraid of being labelled bigots and racists for strongly opposing illegal immigration. Reform has caught that tide, and their Hamilton by-election and local equivalents is the result. Reform, which came within 869 votes of the SNP, accomplished its two objectives: find out if it could pass the acid test of significant support via the ballot box in Scotland, and if so, become a serious participant in the Scottish political scene. It enters the fray for the 2026 Scottish general election in the happy position of having a base, no government record to be attacked on, and opposition parties not understanding that it has risen because of their failures allied to their woke agenda and still clueless on how to combat it. If the parties Reform now threatens do not grasp their contribution to its advance, and stay with their by-election tactic of denouncing it as 'racist' and 'poisonous,' they will make the same mistake as the Democrats in the USA who, in demonising Trump, failed to realise that they had substituted lecturing to the people instead of listening to them. Perhaps even the Greens will look at their derisory 695 votes at Hamilton and reflect on the role they have played in the lecturing game at Holyrood. The big winner was, of course, Labour, who took the seat. The announcement of the result must have been sweet music to the ears of Anas Sarwar and Jackie Baillie, given all the pundits fell for the John Swinney claim that they were being outclassed and heading for a poor third place. Being umbilically attached to the unpopular UK Labour government was thought to be their fatal weak point. That proved not so. Even with a candidate who, as his reading of his victory speech showed, is not exactly inspirational, they took a safe SNP seat. What makes Labour's win important is that Hamilton is smack in the middle of the central belt, where lies the seat of Scottish political power, and where the SNP-Labour contest will be settled. A repeat of Hamilton in 2026 and Labour will be, at least, a minority government or the majority in a coalition. But for the SNP this was a very bad result. John Swinney, whose manifest failure to read the street shows a man with a tin ear and poor judgement, unfit for the leadership role the misguided SNP membership put him in. Their 7,957 votes at 29.4 per cent share of the vote was down by 16.8 per cent and much lower than the 33 per cent they have been getting in opinion polls. The old adage you reap what you sow remains true. The Sturgeon legacy of elevating mediocrity above talent turned the SNP government into a calamity for Scotland. On every issue that matters to the people, tax, jobs, education, housing, health, roads not built, and chid poverty they are failures. They got the defeat they deserved. Under the dead hand of Swinney there is more of that to come.
