Meet the new Queen of Scots: Nicola Sturgeon’s unstoppable rise

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[/audioplayer]‘She sold out the Hydro arena faster than Kylie Minogue,’ said one awestruck unionist of Nicola Sturgeon this week. Scotland’s new first minister has come into office on a tide of support that many in Westminster find hard to imagine. Not only is she packing out concert venues, her party is also consistently scoring above 40 per cent in the polls. If she can keep this momentum going, she will rout Scottish Labour at the next general election.

Defeat in the independence referendum has not halted the nationalists’ momentum — quite the opposite. The party stands on the verge of an electoral breakthrough that few would have thought possible even three months ago.

Yet again, Westminster has read Scotland wrong. During the referendum campaign, one of the most influential Scots in the government told me that failure in the referendum would cause the SNP to descend into chaos. The nationalists would end up divided between those who wanted to settle for beefed-up devolution and those who wanted to keep on pushing for full-blown independence. This is what Labour thought would happen when it created the Scottish Parliament in 1999 — but then, as now, the enemy emerged stronger.

Sturgeon’s achievement is all the more striking because she is becoming first minister in a coronation rather than a contest. She has managed to captivate the public by her mere procession to Bute House. In contrast, Scottish Labour is struggling to get voters interested in its leadership battle, despite it being a dramatic choice between a sharp move to the left under the MSP Neil Findlay or becoming a reformist party under the Blairite MP Jim Murphy.

The new first minister is not a pint-swilling populist nor a shooting star of a politician.