The following article is an addition to a chapter on Nicola Sturgeon by Tom Gallagher in light of recent events. It will appear in his book Europe’s Leadership Famine (1950-2022): Portraits of Defiance and Decay which will be published later in 2023.
DISCUSSING a successor to Sturgeon has long seemed a redundant topic of conversation. But suddenly by 16 February 2023 her party was scrambling to find one. A six week leadership contest, the first staged by the SNP in twenty years, was announced the day after she surprisingly announced her resignation. In the words of the Conservative politician Shaun Bailey ‘she had gone from superstar to nowhere’ in a very short period of time.1
A series of misguided decisions in the previous four months caused one veteran Scottish journalist Andrew Nicoll to observe that the warning all politicians go a little crazy if they hang on to power indefinitely, applied in her case.2 She brushed aside advice that the subordinate parliament could not unilaterally call a referendum meant to take Scotland out of Britain only to find in November 2022 that the UK Supreme Court (presided over by a Scottish judge) ruled unanimously that there was no constitutional basis for her claim. Undaunted she then vowed to use the next UK general election as a de facto referendum on independence. On this issue she was estranged even from party allies who feared that an uncomprehending electorate would punish the SNP. Deaf to persuasion she then ploughed ahead with arranging for a special conference in March 2023 to finalise the plans for this quixotic gesture.
Public opinion was further disregarded on 22 December 2022 when the Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) bill became law. It allows any man, to become a ‘woman’ merely by declaring himself female and living as such for three months. Henceforth, 16-year-olds would be able to change the sex on their birth certificate without a medical diagnosis. This meant rapists who declared themselves to be women could be housed in female prisons.
The cosy club-like atmosphere at Holyrood which has isolated the political class from much of society was shown when an amendment meant to prevent men convicted of sexual offences benefiting from the law was rejected not just by the SNP but by all other parties (excepting a majority of Conservatives). Polls soon showed that a law which enabled individuals to obtain a gender recognition certificate as early as the age of 16 and removing the need for a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, was massively opposed by the electorate. Even 31 per cent of SNP voters endorsed the decision taken by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on 16 January 2023 to block the GRR law (the only Holyrood act where Westminster had deployed its powers to do so). 3
In the same week, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, made a shock announcement that she was quitting with immediate effect, saying she had ‘nothing left in the tank.’ The departure of a politician often compared with Sturgeon because admirers of both saw their determination to chart radical new political courses, raised speculation about the Scottish leader’s mortality. But Sturgeon was adamant she was going nowhere and had plenty of fuel left in her tank. She showed her combative side on 27 January 2023 by delivering a blanket criticism of opponents of GRR as ‘transphobic’, ‘misogynist’, ‘homophobic’ and even ‘racist’.4 Within weeks, polls were showing a sharp fall in backing for independence. One that was published on 13 February 2023 showed a bigger lead for the pro-Union side than there had been in the 2014 referendum. 5 A Westminster poll taken between 10 and 15 February showed that the SNP had slumped to 29 pr cent support, just two points ahead of the Labour Party on 27 per cent.6
On 15 February, Nicola Sturgeon called a hastily-arranged press conference to announce that it was time to ‘reset the tone and tenor of our discourse’ and that she was stepping down. Her statement was prolix and self-referential. ‘I’ ‘me’ my’ were mentioned 153 times, but she mentioned Scotland only eleven times.7 There was a much bigger media reaction, not just in Britain but across much of the world, to her going than had been displayed when the five British Prime Ministers who served during her period in office came and went. However, despite the way she had successfully projected her image during the agitation over Brexit, the Covid pandemic, and the crusade for a new Green technocratic order, it was hard to see how her practical legacy was any better than the leaders who came and went in London.
Even Nationalists who offered praise for her fortitude struggled to dwell on any positive advances in governance. There were no shortage of critics able to point to a range of failures which had worsened life experiences for Scots compared to other equivalent groupings in the West. Among the more restrained was the London Times which in an editorial observed that ‘forced by mistakes of her own making, Ms Sturgeon has hastily abandoned a government without grip, a party without a plan, and a people failed miserably by both.’8 The most fulsome praise came, predictably from pillars of the London’s liberal media who had gained heart from her unstinting attacks on the Conservative Party. Brian Wilson, a former Labour minister under Tony Blair, observed that ‘a harsh tongue took her a long way’.9 This was substantially also the view of Ian Mitchell, whose biography of Sturgeon appeared weeks before her resignation.10 However, more recent Labour figures refused to endorse Wilson’s view that ‘she chose grievance politics over working hard to improve people’s lives’.
Two past leaders of the Labour Party in Scotland, Wendy Alexander and Kezia Dugdale, issued statements of praise for her ‘progressive’ outlook and Liberal Democrat notables were similarly magnanimous.11 It was a sign that much of the political class in Scotland was relaxed about major parts of her left-wing social engineering agenda: it displaced her original focus on political nationalism and enabled some Labour worthies to benefit from the patronage system erected in the diversity, inclusion and equality area.
Whoever succeeds her as SNP leader is likely to be aware her dogmatism in pursuing some of the wider features of this (arguably regressive, not progressive) agenda have saddled the party with a major credibility problem. It won’t easily be forgotten that her nemesis probably turned out to be Adam Graham, a double rapist who had subsequently ‘changed gender’, without any surgical intervention, to become Isla Bryce. He was duly sent to a Scottish women’s prison and Sturgeon was unable to say in increasingly uncomfortable interviews what gender this prisoner was. The incoherence of someone rarely lost for words deepened her isolation.
Up until 2022, on average just 30 people changed gender each year in Scotland.12 Her desire to make Scotland a world leader in radical transgender legislation for people aged 16 and over revealed her to be a zealot whose advanced ideological views had left the bulk of the population behind. Her absorption with this niche cause hurt the larger cause for independence. The growing band of nationalist critics scorned her for relegating it to promote her own image as a voice of international middle-class virtue signaling politics. Her readiness to impose extreme change on an unwilling population had led the author J.K. Rowling who lives in Scotland to take to social media in October 2022 wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: ‘Nicola Sturgeon, destroyer of women’s rights.’13
Throughout 2022 there had been a steady exodus of women members from the SNP. Ash Regan, a member of her government who resigned office over GRR, called for these and other members to be able to rejoin the party so as to be able to take part in the contest to choose a successor. A contest meant to take four months under SNP rules has now been squeezed into six weeks. Emergency conditions brought about by the sudden resignation of the leader are justified as the reasons for truncating the election. A lightning election without the televised hustings seen in the Tory contests of 2022 increases the likelihood a status quo successor will be elected. There will not be time for talented figures, buried in obscurity during the Sturgeon years, to develop campaigns and bond with the party electorate. Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s husband and CEO of the party, shows no sign of departing at the time of writing which means he is bound to play a central role in proceedings. Followers of Sturgeon dominate the upper echelons. They have recently altered the rules of the constitution to enable the party’s national executive committee to enjoy a free hand at such key moments.
The way the succession is being organized seems to pave the way for further dissension in nationalist ranks.14 Sturgeon’s influence is bound to remain in various public bodies, civic and cultural organisations, as well as charitiable campaigning groups that are firmly in her orbit. But it is hard to see anyone being able to drive forward a radical progressive agenda with as much energy and determination as she was able to summon for the task.
Backing for independence had flatlined during her years at the top. Her response to events like Brexit proved pedestrian when a more imaginative separatist leader would have sought to gain advantage from the prolonged disarray and strife at Westminster. Aided, however, by a formidable public relations machine she was able to ensure that much of the political weather in Scotland revolved around whatever was on her mind. In her resignation speech, she asserted that ‘I enjoy approval ratings after eight years in government which most leaders would give their right arms for.’ But by this point she must have been aware that numerous people were laughing at the ridiculous hole she had dug for herself over the trans issue. Her ascendancy was as much to do with the weakness of the opposition as her impact on the face of Scotland. Arguably, there were none (or very few) of the achievements which nationalist, leaders wishing to take a country on a fresh journey, sought to roll out in the public policy field or in infrastructure. Much was spin and artifice concentrating on influencing behaviour and thinking rather than improving physical or mental well-being or transforming the economic face of the land.
‘Resign Sturgeon’ electronic billboards, had been put up at strategic points in Scotland’s two largest cities by the anti-separatist group @MajorityScot 48 hours before she announced her departure. On that evening, several hundred delighted pro-Union locals were filmed performing the Conga in Glasgow’s George Square. It was imagery emanating from Scotland that the rest of the world had seen little of during sixteen years of nationalist control. But it would be very premature to imagine that this movement is now on the way out. The SNP remains a large membership party with a tight grip on key areas of Scottish life in state and society.
Hubris, chronic mismanagement of party and nation, a vendetta outlook, and disdain for the aspirations of perhaps most Scots when politics is put aside, cut short Sturgeon’s time at the top. A leader with such advantageous electoral arithmetic might have expected to carry on for several decades. Instead her undoubted technical skills in politics and her prowess as a communicator, campaigner and image-maker proved of no avail. Authoritarian traits, which grew more pronounced the longer she remained in office, capsized her political career at least in Scotland. She found herself in the invidious position of being outmaneuvered by Rishi Sunak and Alister Jack on the gender recognition hill that she chose to die on. It remains to be seen whether her party can put her stubborn adherence to egotistical and error-strewn rule behind it so as to recover momentum.
In my view, there remains much to play for not least because the Lab-Lib-Con opposition in Scotland and the British establishment at Westminster are bedeviled by major flaws of their own, ones which do not look capable of early resolution.
Sturgeon’s hasty and ignominious exit is revealing not only about her failed stewardship but says much about the shallowness of the claque of well-wishers in metropolitan power-centres across the globe who saluted her as a harbinger of a new progressive order. They wished to reduce world politics to the rolling out of a series of middle-class radical nostrums in which any control over their own lives is snatched from ordinary striving citizens. Needless to say, they were coldly indifferent to the fiasco that ensued in Scotland when a myopic and driven leader pushed parts of the Woke post-modern agenda to breaking-point.
1 GBNEWS, ‘Dan Wootton Tonight’, 16 February 2023.
2 Andrew Nicoll, ‘I worked alongside Nicola Sturgeon for 20 years – here’s what finally pushed her over the edge’, Scottish Sun, 16 February 2023.
3 Rob Harris, ‘The trans rights row sparking a crisis for Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership’, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 February 2023.
4. Michael Blackley,‘Fury as under-fire Nicola Sturgeon accuses gender reform critics of “homophobia and racism”’, Daily Mail, 28 January 2023.
5. Kirsteen Paterson, ‘Lord Ashcroft poll reveals gulf between Scottish Government and voters on independence and gender reforms’, Holyrood Magazine, 13 February 2023.
6 https://twitter.com/electpoliticsuk/status/1626560089040556032 17 February 2023.
7 Steerpike, ‘Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation speech’, Spectator Online, 15 February 2023, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/full-text-nicola-sturgeons-resignation-speech/.
8 ‘The Times view on Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation: Scot Free’, Times, 16 February 2023.
9 Brian Wilson, ‘Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Failure, chose grievance politics over working hard to improve people’s lives’, Scotsman, (Edinburgh) 16 February 2023.
10 Ian Mitchell, Nicola Sturgeon, Vol 1 – The Years of Ascent, 1970-2007, Campbeltown: Independently published, 2022.
11 Kezia Dugdale, ‘I am proud to live in Nicola Sturgeon’s Scotland, The Courier, (Dundee), 16 February 2023, https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/opinion/4148029/kezia-dugdale-nicola-sturgeon-opinion/
See also @wendy_alexander, @agcolehamilton, @joswinson, @willie_rennie
12 The Editorial Board, ‘Trans debacle is the end of the line for Nicola Sturgeon’, Reaction, 27 January 2023, https://reaction.life/trans-debacle-is-the-end-of-the-line-for-nicola-sturgeon/
13 James Hookway and David Luhnow, ‘Nicola Sturgeon Resigns as Scotland’s First Minister’, Wall Street Journal, 15 February 2023
14 Robin McAlpine, ‘Stop Murrell’s corruption NOW’, RobinMcAlpine.org, 17 February 2023, https://robinmcalpine.org/stop-murrells-corruption-now/accessed 17 February 2023.
If you appreciated this article please share and follow us on Twitter here – and like and comment on facebook here. Help support ThinkScotland publishing these articles by making a donation here.
