Nicola Sturgeon’s remarkable downfall

As she faced her final press conference of 2022 last Christmas, the first minister of Scotland seemed unassailable. Nicola Sturgeon had negotiated the Covid pandemic with consummate skill – at least in terms of presentation. Her personal popularity, while not what it was, remained unnaturally high for the leader of a party that had been in government for 15 years. The opposition parties posed no obvious threat to SNP hegemony. She had no internal rivals to worry about.  

Yet two months later Nicola Sturgeon was history, the SNP leadership was in ruins and Police Scotland were preparing to arrest key SNP figures in an investigation into the misuse of party funds. Political downfalls are rarely so precipitate or dramatic. 

It is still a painful mystery to many in the SNP just why their celebrated leader decided to pack it in, without warning, on 15 February 2023. It certainly had nothing to do with the police investigation called Operation Branchform, which saw Sturgeon arrested and then released without charge (she strongly denies any wrongdoing). Think about it: if she’d known that she was about to be arrested, and that infamous forensics tent erected outside her Glasgow home, she would surely not have resigned when she did. Better to retain the glamour and protections of office. The police were hardly going to arrest the first minister of Scotland or stage a blue light-flashing raid on her official residence, Bute House, in Edinburgh’s salubrious New Town.  

So what made her do it? Why did Scotland’s most electorally successful political leader, winner of the last eight elections, resign without warning? It was, Sturgeon told the media, because of the personal toll of 19 years on the front line of politics. She said she’d been inspired by the equally sudden resignation of the New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, 12 months previously. Ardern said she no longer had ‘enough in the tank’. At the time, Sturgeon had insisted that she had ‘plenty in her tank’. So just what led to the exhaustion of the first minister’s fuel supply? 

In late 2022 Sturgeon’s crusading legislation to allow trans people to change sex by declaration – so called self-ID – had become hugely unpopular amongst Scottish voters. She identified strongly with the Stonewall mantra that ‘transwomen are women’ and seemed to take personal affront when women in her own party, like the community safety minister Ash Regan, said they were not and that Self-ID could be exploited by predatory men.  

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Sturgeon was clearly rattled by these attacks from ‘gender critical’ feminists. She denounced them as akin to ‘racists and homophobes’ using uncharacteristically harsh language. Yet the FM seemed lost for words when in January it emerged that a double rapist, Isla Bryson, aka Adam Graham, had been placed on remand in Cornton Vale Women’s prison after he had self identified as a woman. After the public outcry, Sturgeon ordered that Bryson should be relocated to a male jail, but still could not bring herself to call him a man. 

At the close of 2022, Sturgeon was also clearly stung by criticism over her failure to ‘shift the dial’ on independence after winning all those elections. Her attempts to get the courts to authorise an advisory referendum on independence had finally been defeated in the Supreme Court in November 2022. Sturgeon’s response, proposing to turn the next general election into a ‘de facto’ referendum on independence, was ridiculed as constitutionally illiterate even by many nationalists. When she resigned in February she was facing a special conference at which her plebiscite plan was certain to be defeated.  

So Nicola Sturgeon was clearly under pressure in early 2023, but she had faced worse crises in the past, not least her ruinous feud with her predecessor Alex Salmond. None of the issues she faced in the new year seemed terminal. But it seems the first minister was, to use an old Scots word, simply ‘scunnered’ by events.  

We may never know precisely why Sturgeon fell on her sword, only that she did, and that the SNP has been falling on it ever since. She’d been first minister for nearly a decade and had dropped hints about a career beyond politics, yet the party had no coherent transition strategy and lapsed into division and confusion upon her departure.  

During a rushed and chaotic leadership election in March, her husband, the party chief executive, Peter Murrell, and other officials, resigned after false membership figures were given to the press. Sturgeon’s favoured ‘continuity candidate’, the health secretary, Humza Yousaf, squeaked home by the narrowest of margins against his rival the former finance secretary Kate Forbes. Forbes had been on maternity leave when the contest began and few in the party thought this ‘socially conservative’ woman, denounced as ‘intolerant’ by the SNP Westminster leader, Mhairi Black, had much of a chance. A resounding victory it was not.  

And hardly had ‘Humza Useless’, as he was unkindly being called, got his feet under the table in Bute House than everything seemed to go wrong at once. The Deposit Return Scheme for recycling bottles and cans collapsed in disarray; the Highly Protected Marine Areas policy caused a revolt in Highland fishing communities; plans to replace a million gas boilers in Scottish homes by 2030 had to be scrapped. These U-turns and Yousaf’s decision to freeze council tax caused ructions on the nationalist left and friction with the SNP’s Green party coalition partners.  

The SNP’s standing in the opinion polls started a slide from which it has yet to recover. This culminated in Labour’s sensational victory in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election in October on a 20 per cent swing against the SNP. Next year’s general election looks likely to be a nationalist bloodbath.  

With this in mind, Humza Yousaf has wisely laid to rest Sturgeon’s policy of turning the next election into a plebiscite on independence. If it is a ‘de facto referendum’, the SNP are clearly in danger of losing it. His default to the electoral status quo ante seemed to satisfy most critics in the party, even if Scottish voters remain in some confusion about what exactly they’ll be voting for next year. 

Now, a cynic might suggest that Nicola Sturgeon saw this omnicrisis on the horizon and decided to get out while the going was good. Unfortunately for her, any hopes she had of gravitating to some international human rights role have had to be out on ice. The publicity over Police Scotland’s interminable investigation into alleged irregularities in SNP fund raising has damaged her image and her employability. 

Nicola Sturgeon hasn’t been charged with any offence and few even of her sternest critics believe the former first minister is corrupt. But she remains in anxious limbo as she watches the party she led for nearly ten years lapse into division and electoral decline. Her bete noire, Alex Salmond, now leading Alba, is as active as ever, criticising the SNP government loudly from the side-lines and threatening to sue it.

Independence for Scotland seems a distant dream as a resurgent Scottish Labour party exploits the successive policy reverses by an incompetent SNP leadership. The party will never be the same. Apres moi le deluge has never sounded more apt.