Her record wasn’t perfect, but she transformed the landscape. Her exit speech made me rueful for what might have been
Pulling into a service station to listen to Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation speech on Wednesday morning, I was hit by a wave of sadness. It wasn’t that the first minister’s departure was unexpected. Though the precise timing was a shock, she has been visibly flagging for months, and her popularity has been waning even among SNP diehards. “She’s lost the room,” one loyalist told me recently. When Jacinda Ardern – a politician Sturgeon greatly admires – stepped down as the prime minister of New Zealand with the words: “We give all that we can for as long as we can. And then it’s time,” I imagined Sturgeon thinking: “That’s the way to do it.”
Nor am I blind to the chequered nature of the first minister’s legacy. It has been disappointing to watch a woman who came to power with such noble aspirations fail to deliver on a succession of pledges, such as closing the educational attainment gap, and become mired in a succession of controversies, such as the ferry fiasco and the “missing” £600,000 of SNP funds.
Dani Garavelli is a freelance journalist and columnist for the Herald
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