DECLINE AND FALL OF THE STURGEON EMPIRE
She was the most powerful female in UK politics, but her house of cards came crashing down in 12 tumultuous months
It is a year since Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation but it feels like a lifetime since she was a stateswoman revered across the world.
Then Sturgeon was the antidote to the public school prigs and populist strongmen. But not now.
Her flag is no longer planted firmly on the moral high ground, not since the police investigations, the inquiries, the missing WhatsApp messages and the lingering whiff of scandal.
In April 2021, a study by the University of Bristol and Kings College London found 65 per cent of Scottish people trusted the First Minister on Covid-19.
Only 24 per cent said the same of Boris Johnson.
Sturgeon still has her followers and she received a standing ovation at the SNP conference last year but such high levels of public trust in her would be unthinkable today.
In 2021, we were a year into the pandemic when Sturgeon seemed such a steady hand, steering Scotland through unfathomable crisis.
This in sharp contrast to a fortnight ago when, tearfully, she gave evidence to the Covid inquiry, her excuses ringing hollow for what happened to those missing WhatsApp messages.
Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar later claimed Sturgeon “lied” to a journalist when she told them she had preserved WhatsApp messages which the inquiry would want to see.
If Johnson, whose messages also vanished, was, as she called him, a “f ****** clown”, then what did that make her? A hypocrite at best.
Less than two years before she quit, Sturgeon had graced the pages of Vogue, feted by the glossy as the most powerful woman in British politics.
She had politically outlived her fellow female leaders in the Scottish parliament, Labour’s Kezia Dugdale and the Tory Ruth Davidson.
She declared herself then “the last woman standing”.
For a selfie generation of young women who craved more than Instagram gloss, Sturgeon was an influencer who had feminism trending.
And to independence supporters she, for a time, elevated the cause as the only first minister to survive three elections.
So perhaps many did believe her words when she resigned, that she was doing it for the good of the country and “in my head and in my heart”, there was no longer the stamina there for the top job.
After a rather unseemly leadership contest, Humza Yousaf was declared victor but, within days, Sturgeon’s husband and the SNP’s then chief executive, Peter Murrell, was arrested by police in connection with the probe into the party’s
finances. Sturgeon’s insistence the timing of her resignation was not connected, seemed disingenuous. What a crashing disappointment she had become.
Images of that forensic tent outside the couple’s marital Glasgow home hit front pages around the world.
Murrell was questioned and released without charge pending further investigation.
The party’s Edinburgh HQ was
searched and a motorhome was seized from the Fife home of Murrell’s 92-year-old mother.
Former party treasurer Colin Beattie was also later arrested and released without charge.
The reputational damage, though, was irreparable.
On the same day as Beattie’s arrest, Yousaf delivered his first major speech as First Minister but when the electorate should have been visualising his plan for government, they were picturing that blue forensic tent.
For Yousaf, becoming the youngest person, the first Scottish Asian and the first Muslim to serve in office this was a trailblazing moment cruelly overshadowed by a predecessor he had shown unwavering loyalty to.
Sturgeon’s track record in Government came under further scrutiny, with Scotland’s then children’s commissioner, Bruce
For a selfie generation of women she was an influencer who had feminism trending
Adamson, declaring her to have “absolutely failed” to tackle the issues of mental health and child poverty.
One of Sturgeon’s greatest selling points was her humanity and undoubtedly she genuinely cared about the decimation of young lives through lack of chances.
So Adamson’s withering criticism hit hard. When she was arrested in
June 2023 in connection with the SNP finance probe she was released without charge pending further investigation. She told journalists following the arrest: “I am certain I have done nothing wrong.” But it further tainted her already diminished image and only time and the results of the pending investigation will determine whether it can ever be restored.
In the meantime her staunchest critics, including her former mentor Alex Salmond, have been salivating with glee.
Sturgeon is now writing a memoir about her decades in politics which, whatever emerges, is an impressive rise from her working class beginnings.
She is a woman shaped by those days witnessing the economic destruction of her working class
Ayrshire hometown of Irvine by Margaret Thatcher. She cites the former Tory PM as the reason she got into politics and Sturgeon certainly has a compassion where Thatcher had a callousness, a humanity where the Iron Lady had no heart.
But the damage to the SNP by its old regime has been great and in Rutherglen and Hamilton West the party failed its first electoral test since her resignation.
Sturgeon did not slip quietly into the shadows of the back benches as no doubt the new incumbent has hoped.
But it is the public who must now be won over, not the party stalwarts.
The former first minister, a diminished figure, is now more hindrance than help in that regard.
Sturgeon has expressed regrets since leaving power, over not locking down sooner and the unforgivable negligence in admitting untested elderly with Covid from hospitals to the petri dishes of care homes.
Nine publishers bid for Sturgeon’s memoir, due to be published next year but full candour is unlikely.
It remains to be seen after the inquiries and the investigations whether the full truth will finally out.
Whatever Sturgeon decides to reveal, in the end history will be the judge of whether one of Scotland’s most dominant political players was justly or falsely maligned.