JOHN MACLEOD: Nicola Sturgeon is the dethroned queen, willing to do anything for her Scotland save live here

Published: 11:44, 8 August 2026 | Updated: 11:44, 8 August 2026 In February 1993, amid the James Bulger horror and at the callow age of 26, I appeared as a guest on a live steepled-fingers television chat show.  I can remember only one of the other guests: a small, self-possessed young woman with a funny fishy surname who worked at the Drumchapel Law Centre in Glasgow and was already high in the counsels of the Scottish National Party. Polite, but formidable. I remember thinking, ‘Well, if this lass ever makes it into professional politics there’ll be no stopping her’. Never again would I meet Nicola Sturgeon when I was more famous than she was. And now we behold her reputational disintegration. Just this week, for instance, in a new foreword for the paperback edition of Sturgeon’s memoirs, she made contemptuous remarks about her latest successor, John Swinney, and his direction of the SNP’s election campaign earlier this year. It lacked ‘vision or big-picture thinking’ and was ‘detached from the bigger issues bearing down on people’s lives’. The Swinney approach, she asserted, was bleeding SNP support to the Scottish Greens and he should count himself ‘lucky’ they had not fielded more constituency candidates. Sturgeon particularly deplores Swinney’s pivot back to the extraction of North Sea oil and gas. It would be a ‘massive electoral blunder… for the SNP to soften its Left-of-centre environmentalist credentials’. Ms Sturgeon has disparaged 'her successor, his administration and her sometime colleagues in the governance of Scotland,' writes John Macleod Swinney’s successor as SNP leader, she fears, may not prevail in securing independence. Sturgeon further talks so warmly about the Scottish Greens you wonder if she might yet join the Marxist-Lentilists – and these maledictions are of a piece with her public musings last December: looking about the SNP benches, she sighed, she could not ‘say with any certainty that there will be another female leader anytime soon’. For an elder stateswoman of any political party to so behave – patronising her successor, questioning his direction of their party, slamming by insinuation such protegées of her own as Mairi McAllan and Jenny Gilruth – is astonishing. No serious party politician ever thinks aloud about who should be the next leader. If pressed, there is only one seemly answer: there is no vacancy. For years John Swinney showed Sturgeon nothing but fidelity. Where is her loyalty to him in return? And what of all the personal political capital he has had to burn in recent months? Not just in addressing the ferries fiasco, the failure of our schools, the divisive gender-recognition nonsense and all the other dumpster-fires Sturgeon left behind, but the rank wedding-list pillage of SNP funds by Peter Murrell, her estranged husband, now doing serious stir. Every former head of government dreams, now and then, of another reprise in the top job. As late as 1975 Harold Macmillan thought aloud about commanding a save-Britain coalition. Margaret Thatcher seethed through John Major’s toiling rule: infirm of purpose, give me the daggers… But you never cross certain lines. You do not slight your successor, chide your old colleagues, slight rising talent or become any sort of distraction. Just look at one maddening Tory problem for Team Badenoch: how will they ever get Liz Truss to shut up? And the SNP certainly has a problem now: a dethroned queen, willing to do anything for her Scotland save live in it, incapable of passing a spotlight without wanting to dance in it. All the sadder when you consider the Sturgeon record. For much is impressive. She was the first Nationalist ever to win a Glasgow constituency at a general election. She was a widely respected Cabinet Secretary for Health. She had a ferocious work ethic, often putting in 16-hour days. Women warmed to her for the personal reinvention – losing the brutal Prisoner Cell Block H hair-don’t, the manly suits and the hideous shoes. Becoming the vision in fitted block-red Totty Rocks suits, clacking regally into Glasgow election counts like a pair of scissors. Sturgeon, at her 2015 heights – warm, unassuming, funny – was the most popular politician in Britain. After a sterling performance in one televised debate, Google almost broke as people all over England asked: could they, too, vote SNP? Journalists respected her, for Sturgeon never – even off the record – briefed against colleagues. She had become the master of the selfie; the empress of Twitter. Though, as she pertly told us, you should never tweet anything after even one glass of wine. That Sturgeon could still laugh at herself; that was the Sturgeon you would have loved to bump into in Aldi. Our best-read First Minister since Donald Dewar. Who can discuss, for instance, and with genuine authority, the novels of Muriel Spark – and led her party, incredibly, through eight straight wins in national elections. Indeed, thanks to hopeless Tory division over Brexit, for some years from 2016, SNP MPs effectively held the balance of power at Westminster. Incredibly, they had nothing to show for it – save for breaking a long-standing principle to abstain in matters not affecting Scotland. Sturgeon insisted they vote down any bid to re-legalise fox-hunting south of the Border and, later, impose legal abortion in Northern Ireland whether Northern Ireland wanted it or not. And yet, even then, the darkness was reaching out for the darkness. There are striking junctures in Sturgeon’s career. The first was her decision, as a pupil at Ayrshire’s Greenwood Academy in 1986, to join the SNP. It was partly to spite an overbearing teacher who brought in a form for her to join the Labour Party – an early instance of Sturgeon’s ambivalence around men, but a telling one. In 1986 the Nationalists had but two MPs and the party was a faction-ridden mess. Yet so thin on the ground were youthful activists that Sturgeon would only have had to glance at John Swinney – then 22 and already SNP National Secretary – to grasp that, by sheer force of will, she too might rise in its ranks very quickly. Indeed, as early as 1992 and when she was still just 21, she fought the hopeless seat of Glasgow Shettleston for the Nationalists. Another reality would also have coloured her thinking. Scotland then had hardly any female MPs. There were just two in the 1983 Parliament; only three were returned in 1987. Labour was in the deathly grip of the male, pale and stale: had Sturgeon joined their ranks, with neither achievement nor connections, she would never have been heard of again. We flash forward to 2004. Sturgeon by then had been an MSP for five years, yet denied – even at the third asking, in 2003 – the constituency seat of Glasgow Govan. When Swinney’s first outing as SNP leader was ended by the men in grey kilts, Alex Salmond howled down any notion of a comeback and Sturgeon threw her hat into the ring for the leadership. The assured, articulate Roseanna Cunningham, the SNP deputy leader, was running rings around her when, within hours of nominations closing and in a deftly veiled deal with Salmond, he suddenly entered the lists and Sturgeon, as if by magic, was re-slotted for the deputy leadership. To switch her own horse and stop her, Cunningham would have needed dozens and dozens of nomination papers – and had no time to solicit them. They had long been close friends: she and Sturgeon were never the same again. We leap forward another decade. The independence referendum had been lost, Salmond fell on his sword and Sturgeon ended up as sole nominee for the leadership. No one dared to oppose her: there was accordingly no contest, no debate, no thrashing out of ideas and never any post-mortem as to why they had just lost that plebiscite. As I argued forcefully at the time, someone swept to power by acclaim is almost always bad news. Neville Chamberlain, Anthony Eden, Gordon Brown, Theresa May and Rishi Sunak were all thus anointed – and rank among the worst Prime Ministers in modern British history. Not that anyone by May 2015 would listen when, in an extraordinary night of results, 56 of Scotland’s 59 Westminster seats fell to the Nationalists. Little noticed or remarked upon, thousands of people through these months – generally members of the lanyard class – ripped up their Labour cards and enrolled themselves in the SNP. The party was thus hollowed out by such careerists and bent in the direction of Sturgeon’s worst blind spots. An ignorance of rural and Highland realities. An inability to comprehend religious faith. A disdain for family values and a curious fascination for sexual politics; in 2014 – and it was a mistake Salmond would never have made – she sprinted to Scotland’s first same-sex marriage, front and centre in the snaps. The rest you know. Revival of the independence cause, when it really needed a rest. The bold 2016 declaration – ‘judge me on this’ – to transform our schools. The posturing over the EU – even though the best arguments against Brexit are also pretty effective arguments against independence. The creepy Named Person scheme: by the time that Orwellian intrusion into family life was struck down by the UK Supreme Court, it had bilked taxpayers for £61million – and £480,000 in legal costs. And, by then, we were deep into the mounting obsession of Sturgeon and her husband with Salmond. Who had, so audaciously, staged a huge comeback before: a numerate man and a trained economist. One Port Glasgow event, on November 21, 2017, says everything. The First Minister was to launch the new Glen Sannox ferry. Her advance-scheme had earlier scoped things out. Recoiled at the ‘optics’. At their decree, faked plywood funnels were added; further, ‘windows’ were painted all over the superstructure. It would be more than seven years before the benighted ferry would actually sail, in a dark farce that, to date, has cost us half-a-billion pounds. In this summer’s humiliation – Sturgeon seems unaware of that wise political adage ‘as long as you’re explaining, you’re losing’ – she has now flung herself to the succour of the sisterhood. In a rambling interview with Laura Kuenssberg – the sometime FM draped in pink and resembling nothing as much as a melting strawberry ice – Sturgeon declared, ‘For my own sake, but for the sake of people out there, a lot of women who end up finding themselves blamed for the actions of the men in their lives, I’m not going to contribute to that kind of sense that I am responsible for somebody else’s crimes…’ A striking line from a politician who, over the years, has ruthlessly slighted, slammed, marginalised and destroyed many other women. Roseanna Cunningham, Joanna Cherry, Joan McAlpine, Michelle Thomson… the bodies are strewn in Sturgeon’s wake. Who, too, can forget her gloating glee – sniggering delight, pumping little fists – at the 2019 instant when Jo Swinson lost her East Dunbartonshire seat? Nor, railing against her husband – she is adamant she will never visit him in prison, a detail in itself chilling – can Sturgeon grasp that, as SNP leader, her fiduciary duties included ultimate responsibility for the party’s finances. There is no suggestion of criminality – but she was warned something was odd and should be investigated. As is amply documented, she contemptuously dismissed all concerns. Now, flitting from event to event, she disparages her successor, his administration and her sometime colleagues in the governance of Scotland. ‘I really do think Nicola Sturgeon should have a word with herself,’ fumed Geoff Aberdein – former aide to Salmond – on Wednesday. ‘Because she’s shown no loyalty, no self-awareness and no class.’ In June, I first wondered if Sturgeon realised what she was saying. Increasingly, I wonder if she knows who she is. Perhaps because, as someone in 2020 shrewdly observed, she spent far too much time as First Minister dreaming of her next job. Handsomely waged, not onerous, some blobby and sententious role in the wake of Hillary Clinton, Mary Robinson, Madeleine Albright – and on the international stage. But the nations never warm to gabby, tarnished moral collapse. That is a call Sturgeon will never now receive; an absolution that will never come.