"She only has herself to blame." Andy Buchanan/ POOL/AFP/Getty Images.

So it’s goodbye from Nicola Sturgeon. During a relatively expansive press conference on Wednesday — the prolonged duration of which somewhat undermined her claim that she always knows when it’s time to go — she offered the official version of why she was stepping down. No, this was definitely not a response to “short-term pressures” such as the Isla Bryson prison controversy or the ongoing investigation into SNP financial irregularity. As if delivering a shocking revelation to her audience, she confided that the real reason was because she was “a human being”. Politics has more “intensity” and “brutality” these days than it used to, she said, and her heart is no longer in it.
During her address to journalists, the First Minister’s well-honed rhetorical abilities cast their usual spell — broken only during the Q&A, when she was asked about her legacy of a collapsing NHS, widening attainment gaps in literacy and numeracy in schools, and soaring numbers of drug deaths every year. Before that, though, we were firmly in Sturgeonland, where — a bit like being on a Highland distillery tour — reality tends to disappear in a euphoric haze and temporarily everything looks better than it actually is.
Despite plummeting personal approval ratings, she focused several times on consoling those who, she assumed, would be saddened by her departure, giving the impression of trying to avert outpourings of weeping in the streets. Putting an optimistic gloss on the general mediocrity of her party, she implied that for too long she had eclipsed the many talented SNP politicians with her own brilliance, promising that from now on we would be able to see them more clearly. And perhaps most startlingly — fresh from calling critics of her government’s gender law reforms “homophobic” and “racist” only a fortnight ago — she noted that, over the years, she had somehow become a lightning rod for “irrationality” in the “tone and tenor of discourse” on controversial areas, and expressed the fervent desire that things be less polarised from now on.
All of this must have been quite enraging for one of the few actually talented individuals left in the SNP, Joanna Cherry. Cherry is well-known for disagreeing with the party line on gender law reform in favour of self-identification, arguing that it will harm women’s and lesbians’ rights. In 2021, on the same day that an SNP supporter sent her violent sexualised threats for which he was later convicted, Cherry was sacked from her Westminster front-bench role, apparently for her opposition to self-ID. You don’t get much more “intensity” and “brutality” in politics than that.
Equally, Sturgeon’s new turn as a pacifist in the culture wars must have been hard for Joan McAlpine to hear. She was a highly successful MSP for a decade, but was viciously ostracised in 2019 for expressing reservations about the conflation of sex and gender identity in the Scottish Census. She was eventually pushed out of politics via a gerrymandered party rule change that some suspected was deliberately designed to oust her.
Sturgeon did nothing at the time to reduce toxicity in the party with respect to Cherry and McAlpine, even when SNP MPs were openly describing the pair as hateful for views about self-ID which — it now turns out — most of the Scottish population share. Quite the contrary: she frequently turned the heat up, via the regular delivery of public statements of support for transactivist causes that could easily be read as green lights for others to carry on smearing. Right up until the moment a fortnight ago when the First Minister was left havering on ITV about whether Isla Bryson is or is not a woman, she tended to present any dissent towards the “trans women are women” mantra as the product of confused or malicious thinking. When a headteacher publicly sides with the school bullies, she might as well have declared open season on their victims.
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