Sturgeon need only look in mirror to see why her legacy is failure

Telegraph

12-03-2025

It appears that it was never Nicola Sturgeon's fault that so many of her enterprises ended in failure; someone else was always to blame. And at the top of her list were the 'bully boy alpha males' who appeared to have dogged her footsteps throughout a long career that she says she is soon to bring to a close by not standing in the Scottish parliament elections next year.
Those were the single most destructive of her enemies, she reckons, during a near three decades at the top of Scottish politics, a period that also saw her clamber up the greasy pole of international elected office. The fact that it was a brief entry into such an elite grouping is, in her view, all due to the bad guys.
For someone who watched almost all of her years striving to get to the top and, in at least Scottish terms, briefly getting there, I think Nicola Sturgeon is doing herself a disservice because to decide who is responsible, she should look no further than the mirror.
I wasn't the only one who believed her to be a rising political star while the SNP was in opposition, able to more than hold her own in the admittedly lacklustre world of the Holyrood parliament. She was no slouch, either, when confronted by so-called superior beings from Westminster; in fact, I can't remember her losing in any such contest.
However, in a swansong delivered one week before her announcement that she plans to resign as an MSP next year, she appeared to apportion most of the blame for her failure in government to those nasty bully boys.
It's true that in 2015, she won an election that will take some beating, when as first minister the SNP won 56 of Scotland's then 59 Commons seats. But that total has withered ever since, until there are now nine SNP MPs – a collapse due almost entirely to her legacy.
Alpha males had nothing to do with this fall from grace, but a hard-nosed female who surrounded herself with acolytes and who brooked no argument was the main reason. In Glaswegian patois, she was the kind of woman to whom a working man would ever return home on a Friday night with a 'broken pay packet'.
Furthermore, in terms of legacy, two subsequent SNP leaders and first ministers, Humza Yousaf and now John Swinney, discovered their main task was to prove to voters that Sturgeon rule was a thing of the past. To do that, they had to prove that the daft coalition deal with the ultra-Leftist Scottish Greens had gone and that support for her gender recognition bill is no more, thanks to a veto from the UK Government.
Certainly on Swinney's watch, independence is still an SNP priority, even if it now lags somewhere behind 'bread and butter' issues like health, education and the economy, and as none of these three look like getting a great deal better, maybe the dreaded Indyref2 demand will slip further down the Nat agenda.
Sturgeon believes that the Donald Trump presidency will see politics becoming 'more grim', except that if she'd stayed around wouldn't it get grimmer still, with her perpetual demand for the break-up of Britain that hardly anyone now supports?
But of course, as she prepares herself for retirement from active politics, one large question remains unanswered: What happened to the £660,000 that went missing nearly five years ago from SNP coffers?
Peter Murrell, her former husband and lately chief executive of the SNP, has been arrested and charged in connection with that missing money, but there has been no further development.
Both Sturgeon and a former party treasurer have been arrested and then freed pending further inquiries. Police Scotland say that the report of their investigation – codenamed Operation Branchform – was handed to the Crown Office, Scotland's prosecuting authority, last August and that they 'await direction'.