Farewell, Nicola Sturgeon. Nobody is going to miss you

Nicola Sturgeon’s long farewell has come to an end, with one last burst of misty-eyed sentiment from her right-on Remainer admirers in England. Adored by them for her fashionable Leftwing pig-headedness, her strong Scottish accent and her status as a figurehead of wokeness, her departure has seen a chorus of praise from figures south of the border.

“Whether or not you back her ideas and convictions, she has been one of the most important politicians of this generation,” opined ITV’s Robert Peston after her initial resignation statement. “Her call for less irrationality and hysteria in politics should be heeded,” he added without apparent irony.

I wish I could join the legions of my fellow Londoners paying homage to the Scottish Iron Lady. The world blatantly needs more brazen women in higher places rather than fewer.

But what it does not need is more divisive, destructive leaders. And as I listened to Sturgeon’s final speech as first minister last week, I found myself recoiling in familiar fashion.

There was something scary in her fundamentalist certainty that Scotland would one day attain the holy grail of independence, but she was also almost comically un-self-aware.

The woman who brought herself down by pursuing gender self-ID and whose government’s education policies included encouraging children as young as four to question their gender said that she wanted to spend more time devoting herself to the issues she really cares about – like gender equality.

Under Sturgeon, Scotland also saw a surge of anti-English sentiment that should have been funny in its pettiness, but which added up to something genuinely deranged. Scottish government officials grumbled at length about a children’s book commemorating the Platinum Jubilee. Its literary offences? Containing passages about Brexit, the failed independence referendum and the 1966 World Cup.

Such attempts to tweak history to better suit political narratives were par for the course, alongside other propagandistic elements. At one point, North Lanarkshire Council issued a “study aid” featuring pro-independence slogans and a factsheet on Nicola Sturgeon – hardly appropriate in a modern liberal democracy.

With the results of the SNP’s leadership contest being announced tomorrow, the party has a chance to make itself less nasty. It is unlikely to succeed. Frontrunner Humza Yousaf last week called the British Government “foreign” in a row over Scotland’s disastrous Gender Recognition Reform Bill.

But Sturgeon has made her party toxic on a far wider range of issues. The SNP has built on its long tradition of Anglophobia to foster division in Scotland and, during Covid, revealed an unpleasantly authoritarian streak, often appearing to impose rules merely to embarrass the Government in London.

By 2021, the rows within the nationalist movement had taken on the air of a grotesque carnival. Alex Salmond accused Sturgeon of misleading the Scottish parliament and of trying to destroy his reputation, aided and abetted by SNP executives including her husband, Peter Murrell – accusations that Sturgeon rejected.

But the veteran Scottish journalist Andrew Neil wrote that “democratic accountability and transparency in Scotland” had been “choked in a Kafkaesque fog”, in a scathing account of “a compromised legal system” and “supine” Scottish broadcasters.

And this gets to the core of the matter. Whatever else she did as first minister, Nicola Sturgeon harmed Scotland.

An avowed hater of Margaret Thatcher, she also, unsurprisingly, hated entrepreneurship. Firms that dared to open in Scotland were punished with high business rates sometimes out of step with those in England. Holyrood pushed up income tax rates on individuals too. Since this power was devolved, Scots have paid more tax than their English neighbours while getting precious little in return for it.

The public services that one might have expected would benefit under such a staunch progressive have performed poorly.

A&E waiting times have been the worst on record. GP appointments, ambulance waiting times and the mental health of the population have all deteriorated. Drug deaths, meanwhile, have continued to rise.

These problems might eventually have been mitigated in a flourishing economy, but Sturgeon also had the looniest of green bits between her teeth. Despite Scotland’s many economic and fiscal problems, she was apparently determined to kill off North Sea oil and gas in favour of an unrealistic total switch to renewables.

The thousands of people whose jobs depend on North Sea extraction were expected to simply trust that all would be well.

Scotland saw a surge of petty anti-English sentiment that seemed genuinely deranged

The rest of the world, too, had a stake in this. Sturgeon may have felt free to mess up her own country, but her desire to endanger world peace by getting rid of Britain’s nuclear deterrent, anchored in Scottish waters, was an unforgivably immoral bit of peacenikery.

We love to love, or hate, a Marmite leader, but Nicola Sturgeon was just bad – and very far indeed from the principled, courageous battle-axe of progressive causes lauded by her fans in England.

So spare us the eulogies and the plaudits. Her exit can only be a good thing.

Unfortunately, the wrongs she has bestowed on Scotland will not be righted until the SNP is banished.