When Nicola Sturgeon pressed the self-destruct button

One year ago Nicola Sturgeon shocked the political world by throwing in the towel - and unintentionally rescued the UK

It is the first anniversary of that extraordinary moment in British political history when the First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, resigned without warning, plunging her party into chaos and driving the independence movement into a brick wall. Unionists could not believe their luck. It was almost totally unexpected - though columnists like myself had been suggesting for a while that time was running out on the Sturgeon era. Well, after nearly a decade in Bute House, and with mounting policy failures, that didn’t take a great deal of prescience.

Nevertheless, we all remember where we were on that fateful February morning. I happened to be in Tenerife, which made supplying the many interested broadcasting and print outlets rather difficult. It was only then that you realised just how big a politician Nicola Sturgeon had become. She’d acquired global recognition. Was hailed, especially in Europe, as an icon of anti-Brexit progressivism: the ideal feminist politician and antidote to Boris Johnson . Everyone wanted to know what had made Scotland’s greatest political export quit out of the blue.

Her party wanted to know too. The SNP was caught completely off guard by their leader’s decision to depart the field without any obvious successor and without any transition planning. It was chaos. Headless chickens could have organised the aftermath with more dignity and purpose. The party officials and most SNP politicians thought she would remain until after the 2024 general election and, after another thumping victory, announce her schedule for gravitating to that international human rights job she was assumed to be seeking, and about which she had dropped hints as broad as the Moray Firth. She also said she wanted to write her memoirs. She could not have imagined in her worst nightmare quite how the last chapter was going to play out.

But on 15th February last year Ms Sturgeon must have thought that she was going out on a high. Certainly, her approval ratings had been remarkably good in late 2022 for a First Minister who’d been in post for nearly a decade. It seems a lifetime ago that she stood proud at her Bute House podium lecturing the nation and the media on, essentially, why they didn’t deserve her. She obliquely chided the press for insisting on questioning policies like her pet gender reform bill and suggested that Scottish politics was altogether too small minded these days

Sturgeon reminded her bewildered party that she’d won the previous eight elections straight – generally by thumping majorities. But she said she now wanted to stop being Nicola the politicians and start becoming Nicola “the human being” again. Like the New Zealand leader, Jacinda Ardern, she’d nothing left in the tank, no more to give. She was to find that becoming that human being wasn’t as easy as it sounded.

But Sturgeon was in her pomp, striding confidently out of public life wearing her trade mark vivid red suit. Twelve months on, we saw a pale shadow of that politician justifying her actions before a sceptical inquisitor at the UK Covid Inquiry hearings. All political careers end in tears, but rarely do they end so literally. Some claimed that Nicola Sturgeon’s tearful performance was contrived, after admitting that she had deleted her WhatsApp messages despite giving an on-the-record promise to retain them for public scrutiny. Sturgeon has been caught out and she knew it. The emotion was real enough.

The former SNP leader was also caught out over her transparent attempt to politicise the pandemic and promote her “Zero Covid” policy of halting the virus at the border. Even her own hand picked scientific advisers had said that this policy was ludicrous. Ordinary people may not follow the detail of political scandals and probably had forgotten all about the nationalist loons appearing in hazmat suits at the border telling English tourists to go home, but they can tell when a politician has lost the plot. And with hindsight we see that mislaid it long before she resigned. 

Historians will probably date the downfall of Scotland’s most electorally successful First Minister to the court battle with her predecessor, and former mentor, Alex Salmond in 2019. A house divided is a house defeated. Much is yet to be revealed about the machinations behind those courtroom dramas, concealed as the were by the anonymity conferred on Salmond’s accusers. But most SNP activists know the names and pack drill by now. 

Anyway, the court records tell their own story. Salmond was acquitted in the High Court on all charges levelled by members of the Scottish government and and senior members of the SNP. In his earlier judicial review, the former First Minister won £512,000 in costs for the “unlawful” attempt by Sturgeon’s minions to accuse him of sexual harassment. 

The party had already been getting restive about Sturgeon’s failure to “move the dial” on independence despite winning all these elections and her famous “mandates”. Her next legal battle, to secure an “advisory” referendum on independence, ended in costly failure in the Supreme Court in November 2022. Even many of her most loyal supporters thought her subsequent proposal to turn the next general election into a “defacto” referendum on independence was unhinged. Then came Isla Bryson. 

The revelation that a double rapist had been placed on remand in Cornton Vale women’s prison was a national scandal in January 2023. The Scottish Prison Service, it turned out, had been anticipating Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Bill by allowing convicted sex offenders to become legally female by Self-ID without any medical intervention. Even feminists accused her of endangeering women. 

But the legal imbroglio that did most damage to Sturgeon’s political image seemed none of her doing. Scotland is still waiting to learn exactly why police erected that forensics tent outside her Uddingston home in April 2023. No charges have been brought, though the former Chief Constable, Iain Livingstone, has talked darkly about “potential fraud and embezzlement”. There is no evidence that Nicola Sturgeon has done anything wrong, but as the investigation dragged on her reputation was dragged into the mud. 

Perhaps if she’d remained at her desk in Bute House that blue tent might never have appeared. It became the single image most associated with Nicola Sturgeon’s departure – at least until last week’s photos of her wiping away tears at the Covid inquest.

Yet the Covid pandemic had been, even for many of her critics, Ms Sturgeon’s finest hour. Her daily press conferences in 2020/21 showed the former FM at her best: well briefed, coherent, articulate, wise even, compared with the bumbling of Boris Johnson. Many believe to this day that Scotland suffered fewer excess deaths than England. 

That was the power of communication and Nicola Sturgeon was undoubtedly an excellent communicator. How ironic therefore that it was miscommunication that brought down the final curtain on her brilliant career.