The mystery of the missing First Minister
Resigning in the wake of the trans rapist row was stupid. And Nicola Sturgeon isn’t stupid. So what was really going on?
A TV presenter tried to flatter me last week by saying I’d predicted the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon. I did nothing of the kind. I was as surprised as anyone when the news broke on Wednesday morning that the First Minister was standing down apparently because she is “a human being” and couldn’t take it any more.
I had of course been saying that she was out of time, running out of road, facing a sea of troubles and other cliches indicating that she was not going to be around in Bute House for much longer. It was her body language as much as anything. You could tell she had simply had it up to here.
It didn’t take journalistic genius to see that things had started to go seriously wrong for the First Minister on just about every front - and not just because of her misguided policy of transgender Self-ID. It is hard to identify any policy of hers that has not foundered. From Ferry contracts to the “defacto” referendum; bottle recycling to the educational attainment gap everything was going wrong at once. The NHS which she ran competently for a decade while deputy to Alex Salmond is collapsing in real time and no longer functions in large parts of Scotland according to the BMA. That must have hurt. Cosla and the unions are savaging her £1bn Social Care Service, which was her solution to the post-Covid crisis in Scottish hospitals. There seems no solution to the teachers strikes damaging children’s futures.
Sturgeon had reached that unfortunate stage in the lives of long-serving leaders when nothing works, nothing goes right. The aura of competence that was her trade mark had evaporated. She had just been around too long, acquired too many negatives, appointed too many ministers who should never have been let near a ministerial Prius, not to mention Humza Yousaf.
She had anyway been dropping broad hints for the last two years that, at 52, she wanted to pursue a new career after politics: write a book, become a foster parent, maybe become an international human rights figure. That her party never took her seriously on this is perhaps their fault not hers.
However, I never thought this intensely cautious and sensible politician could do anything so rash as to resign in pique when the press is still full of stories about sex offenders being sent to women’s prisons.
Some people tried to transplain to me last week that it was the Scottish Prison Service, not the first minister, who sent the double rapist, Isla Bryson, to Cornton Vale, as if that somehow exonerated the First Minister. In fact, always on top of her brief, she must have known well that her favourite government-funded charity, the Trans Alliance, was piloting self ID in prisons to show how well it works prior to the legislation. Unfortunately the public saw only too well how it worked and were horrified.
Any political adviser worth their salt substitute would surely have told her to wait, let the storm abate. Don’t leave office while the newspapers are full of stories about sex offenders being sent to women’s jails, trans butchers being prosecuted for rape, the Sandyford gender clinic giving puberty blockers to 9 year olds. She needed to let some time elapse for these lurid images to fade from the public mind.
Nicola Sturgeon was always a brilliant manager of the media. What a time for her skill to abandon her. History will now record that Nicola Sturgeon resigned from office after she was unable to say that a double rapist was a man.
If she had only waited a month other issues would have begun to crowd out the trans frenzy. The special conference on her plans for a “defacto” referendum was likely to be a blow to her authority. It was clear that it was going to be rejected. Very well. That could have been a safer moment to say: ok, enough is enough, it’s time for me to go. History would then have said she had lost the plot on the route to independence rather than the route to Cornton Vale. She could have used the special conference to manage the news of her departure.
So I don’t get it. What possible reason could she have had been for leaving so precipitately? For all the tributes it was clear that her SNP colleagues were royally pissed off. And rightly. There has been no transition planning. No positioning of a replacement. Whoever has the dubious fortune to succeed Nicola Sturgeon will inherit a party in shambles. The Gender Reform Bill is surely dead. The coalition with the Greens is about to collapse. The administration is in chaos and the public sector effectively running out of cash to meet inflation and pay claims.
Some are inevitably saying: follow the money. That the police investigation into alleged mismanagement of party funds forced the First Minister’s hand. Operation Branchform is investigating what happened to £600,000 that was raised for an independence campaign that never happened. Her husband, party chief executive Pete Murrell, in an inexplicable fit of generosity later lent the SNP a hundred grand. This has as also raised eyebrows - though no one is clear why. But I do not believe Nicola Sturgeon is a crook. It’s not in her nature. She wouldn’t know how.
Was it last week’s opinion poll showing that 43% of Scots thought she should emulate the Moody Blues and go now? Hardly. Rishi Sunak would kill for Sturgeon’s popularity ratings. The SNP dominates politics at every level and there was no real indication that this was going to change.
Perhaps we will never know quite what led to the downfall of the SNP’s most electorally-successful leader. Maybe she really did just take a “scunner ” as Scots call it and decided to quit in rage against the machine. She couldn’t face the inevitable scrapping of her flagship gender bill, had lost her party’s confidence over the referendum and wanted to hand the reins of chaos to someone else.
It seems that the former finance secretery Kate Forbes is the most likely to succeed her in Bute House. She will inherit the wreckage of a party which was brilliant at winning elections but which failed to translate that into progress to independence for Scotland - the cause to which Nicola Sturgeon dedicated her life.
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If you want to read more on Nichola Sturgeon’s chequered legacy, I recommend this elegantly written piece by fellow Substacker, Alex Massie:
A trans person is not trans until the equipment they were born with has been changed. A wrenching decision for sure, that ADULTS should only undertake after much thought. A trans-in-process is a better term for those persons who maintain their original equipment, while taking hormones to change body chemistry. The debate about trans persons is fraught with danger; fortunately no right to not be offended exists. Where there is no intent to give offence, there is no foul.
Where was the counsel to whom Sturgeon as leader could consult, if she was intent of stepping down, about the best time in the interest of the party?
- prior leadership… closed avenue
- Chief Executive… hmmm
- leadership group/ management board… a reminder of the historians’ observation that dominance invariably eliminates the nurturing of opposition and alternative thought.
On the bright side, the prospect of Forbes with Murrell should provide more copy for you.
Should a party strategist have a pause button, now is the time to press, please.