FINALLY, with her announcement that she will not seek re-election to the Holyrood parliament, Scotland will be rid of the false prophet that is Nicola Sturgeon. Her lamentable, sordid, catastrophic tenure in Scottish politics will soon be at an end. Her influence (albeit recently faint as an almost permanently absent MSP) on the country she claims to love, but in fact just about destroyed, will be over and she will drift away, hopefully to total and totally deserved obscurity.
The fact that Sturgeon submitted her papers for selection for her party for the 2026 election and was accepted just last month is distinctly odd. But then much about Sturgeon is odd, not least the mesmeric hold she seemed to have, for far too long, on much of the electorate and, far less forgivably, the fourth estate. I once heard the editor of one the UK’s most venerable and distinguished right of centre publications declare Sturgeon ‘the best politician in Europe’. I had my head in my hands. How could any sane person ever have believed that?
Even today, amidst largely critical career obituaries there is some vestigial praise, for her ‘winning’ successive elections, for energising and raising the profile of the independence movement, for championing the rights of minorities (at least until she lost her way with the ill-fated Gender Recognition Reform Bill) and, perhaps most laughably of all, at least for TCW readers, her daily covid briefings wherein she ‘bravely’ stood at a podium and read a list of junk data statistics and imposed absurd and soul-destroying regulations on a terrorised and traumatised (by the likes of Sturgeon) public.
I sometimes feel that I’m like those few people who didn’t witness the meteorite storm that begins John Wyndham’s classic novel The Day of the Triffids. Theywere left able to see when everyone else was blinded. So it was with Sturgeon: many were dazzled, somehow, by her ascent, attaching to this bitter, banal, talentless figure attributes and depth that were to the clear-sighted quite obviously absent. It has taken nearly two decades, during which Scotland has been traduced and trashed, for most people (unbelievably, she still has fans) to see the light.
On every metric, some of which she insisted she must be judged on, Sturgeon failed dismally. Educational standards, once a source of great pride for Scotland, have tumbled to the point where the international statistics became so embarrassing that the SNP withdrew from them. Health care is a mess, drug deaths are at terrifying levels, and almost every intervention in business made by a Sturgeon administration ended in a hugely expensive fiasco. The barely seaworthy, seven years late and hundreds of millions of pounds over budget ferries are the perfect symbol of those wretched locust-eaten years.
Don’t get me started on the gender madness, precipitated by Sturgeon’s odd (again) pivot towards identity issues and boosted by her decision to go into partnership with the deranged Greens. Suffice to say that one can but hope that future historians will look back in incredulity and dismay at the day the MSPs of Scotland’s parliament voted down an amendment to stop men charged with sexual offences from claiming they were women and if found guilty placed in the male estate. Yes, that really happened, and not just the SNP but most of Labour and Lib Dem members too.
Thankfully, in just about the only worthwhile thing the last Tory administration did, that insanity was blocked by the government, though the mad march of wokeness was barely interrupted, as the Sandie Peggie tribunal currently under way in Dundee demonstrates.
Wokeness is everywhere in Sturgeon’s Scotland, a country in many ways unrecognisable to that which proudly existed before the mind virus took hold. Peak woke was constantly redefined in a country that appeared to have lost its mind – a country where rape victims could be upbraided for requesting a biologically female counsellor. Yes, that really happened here too.
Vying for the scariest of Sturgeon’s dread legacies though is what has happened to Scotland’s judiciary. Will Operation Branchform, launched in July 2021 following complaints from the public over how the SNP had spent campaign donations and now in the hands of the Crown Office, ever conclude? Or will it be swept under the threadbare and soiled tartan rug, if room can be found amid all the other dark matter that has been denied the public gaze? Will we ever know what really happened when Alex Salmond was charged and cleared of various sexual offences? Will we ever get to the bottom of how covid money was distributed? Or how certain plum seats were allocated to SNP favourites? Who knew what? Where did the money go? The Sturgeon years were an orgy of redaction, obfuscation and evasion. Almost no one was ever held accountable and the truth never stood a chance of seeing the light of day. Will it ever again?
Sturgeon will soon be gone, and even her extremely rare and wholly unremarkable appearances at Holyrood will be no more. Forget about a post-politics career. Sturgeon has no marketable abilities, at least none that are obvious to me. Her book is out in September, apparently. It will be in the remainder bin by October. Her one pseudo-superpower, her knack of persuading the credulously persuadable that she had substance, is surely gone. She was a snake oil saleswoman, except the snake oil was herself and her signature concoction wasn’t just harmless, it was toxic.
Perhaps like her desperate sister with her tarot readings and seances, she will attempt to relaunch herself in a wholly new arena. The mind boggles at the possibilities. But who really cares? Unless the public is daft enough to subsidise some new chapter, she is on her way out, finally; and to quote another female politician of a class and quality Nicola Sturgeon couldn’t get within a million miles of, Margaret Thatcher, ‘just rejoice at the news’.
