Sturgeon’s grip on power is weakening – and she has only herself to blame

IT was hailed as a brilliant appointment which proved that First Minister Nicola Sturgeon was entirely serious when she said she wished to be judged on her stewardship of Scotland’s education system. When Ms Sturgeon appointed John Swinney to the post of Education Secretary in her cabinet, she wanted to show that she really did mean business.

After nine years as finance secretary, where his reputation as a prudent and effective politician was forged, Mr Swinney had proved himself the standout member of the SNP’s front bench.

Why, even the elderly Tory ladies of Perthshire North were seduced by his intellect and lined up again and again to ensure his re-election to the Scottish parliament.

Last week, in a moment which might yet come to define this Scottish Government, the First Minister announced that her administration would not be bringing forward its much-anticipated Education Bill.

Two years of Mr Swinney’s leadership of the education department had brought us to a point where the Government simply had nothing to offer. By any standards, this should be considered a disaster.

Under pressure by the majority of Scottish voters to move her focus away from a second independence referendum they did not – and do not – want, the First Minister hoped Mr Swinney would deliver the improvements that Scottish pupils so desperately need.

But while he was certainly full of good intentions and had the rhetoric to match, he has not steered the ship of schools away from the rocks.

Standards in literacy and numeracy continue to make a mockery of the notion that a Scottish education should be considered one of the finest in the world.

Despite Mr Swinney’s steel, unions carry on protecting under-performing teachers while resisting reform. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that failure to introduce the Bill is evidence the cabinet secretary is out of his depth. And if Mr Swinney is out of his depth, one wonders who else among the SNP front bench might do a better job. He remains, after all, a politician of substance – not something one could easily say about the majority of his colleagues in the SNP parliamentary group. If the news that she had ditched her

as‘bit promised Bill wasn’t painful enough for the First Minister, more agony was to come.

Ms Sturgeon had announced on Wednesday that backbencher Gillian Martin was to be made a junior education minister as part of a reshuffle, which saw Shona Robison replaced Health Secretary and the SNP’s deputy leader Keith Brown removed from his post as Economy Secretary and put in charge of the party’s independence strategy. (Only the most gullible would reckon this a vote of confidence in Mr Brown’s talents.)

Shortly after the First Minister disclosed her plan to promote Ms Martin, it emerged that the MSP had, in her past life as a college lecturer, written a blogpost that contained references to ‘hairy-knuckled, lipstickwearing transgender laydees’.

The article, which Ms Martin wrote at the time might ‘get me sacked’, went on to complain that college public relations staff ‘froth at the mouth with excitement if anyone in a wheelchair does anything that can be remotely described as an achievement’.

Remarkably, this revolting stuff was not the reason Ms Sturgeon decided against appointing the MSP for Aberdeenshire East to her Ministerial team. Ms Martin’s remarks about transgender and disabled people had been made public two years ago and, apparently, the First Minister did not consider them a bar to her holding a government position.

It was only on Thursday, when Tory deputy leader Jackson Carlaw raised the matter of a second blogpost in which Ms Martin discussed the tipping habits of ‘blacks’ and ‘Jews’ that the First Minister admitted she had made a mistake.

Naturally, this admission of what looked, smelled and sounded like a colossal error of judgment came with conditions. The words written by Ms Martin did not reflect the person Ms Sturgeon knew, and critics should be careful they were not throwing stones from within glass houses.

Ms Martin continued the story that she had expressed views with which she disagreed. If anyone was a victim, it was Ms Martin, whose career was knocked off track by things she didn’t mean to write. And if there was a bad guy, it was whoever was controlling Ms Martin’s fingers while she typed those words with which she so fiercely disagreed.

Ultimately, we were left with three possibilities: either Ms Martin was a bigot or she was an idiot or she had been briefly possessed by the spirit of a bigoted idiot.

Whatever the truth, she is clearly unfit for the position to which Ms Sturgeon wished to promote her.

Fortunately for the First Minister, summer recess came along on Thursday afternoon and she was able to escape the Holyrood chamber where, without doubt, her judgment over the Martin decision and, more importantly, the scrapping of the Education Bill would have continued to provide ample fuel for opposition politicians.

But while the end of term might have given the First Minister breathing space, the problems that made the last week of term such an unmitigated disaster haven’t gone away. When MSPs return to Holyrood after their summer holidays, the crisis in Scottish education will still require to be addressed. So too, if the First Minister has any sense, will the calibre of politicians selected by the SNP.

There are plans by SNP constituency associations in a number of areas to deselect candidates and replace them with, as one veteran campaigner put it to me, ‘people who are not f ****** morons’.

When Nicola Sturgeon succeeded Alex Salmond as First Minister, she promised a new, more consensual, less combative style of politics. But all the evidence, four years on, is that she is as angrily monomaniacal about independence as her predecessor ever was.

In 2014, Ms Sturgeon was seen by SNP members as their best hope of winning a second referendum, and by mainstream Unionists as a fair player who would accept the result of the independence referendum.

Now she is every bit as divisive as Alex Salmond at his most belligerent, and even among her once devoted membership there are questions about her judgment.

Her grip on power grows weaker and she has, despite Mr Swinney’s failure to deliver a workable Education Bill and the appalling comments of Ms Martin, only herself to blame.

She is every as divisive as Alex Salmond at his most belligerent