Nicola Sturgeon is a paradigm of political failure

So farewell then, Nicola Sturgeon. When a politician’s career ends, it is the duty of responsible commentators to deliver a fair assessment, making a sincere attempt to balance the defects with whatever achievements may be chalked up to the departing legislator. Alister Jack, Scottish Secretary, faced that challenge in attempting to find something creditable to say about Nicola Sturgeon: all that he was able to dredge up was her contribution (or perhaps her refraining from opposing) the creation of two Scottish freeports.

It is a sad testimony to the bleak state of Scottish politics since devolution that the only people who could credibly praise Sturgeon are those who share her obsessive, bitterly partisan ambition to destroy the United Kingdom. Her career was purely destructive, directed mindlessly against the oldest and most successful political union in Europe. To that objective she diverted every issue, every governmental responsibility, at heavy cost to Scotland’s community harmony, public services and prosperity. Sturgeon was a totemic example of the kind of blinkered ideologue who increasingly dominates Western politics today.

The condition in which she leaves Scottish education, within recent memory the jewel in her country’s crown, is a legacy that, of itself, would destroy the reputation of any politician. When the similar demise of other Scottish institutions, notably healthcare, is added to the equation, the totality of that legacy becomes a disgrace of historic proportions. It will be many long years before Scotland claws its way back – if, under devolution, it is ever allowed to do so – to the state of relative well-being from which Sturgeon and her party diverted it.

Scotland under Sturgeon was a realm of fantasy, a La La Land in which false reassurance inadequately concealed all-encompassing failure. The one thing that ever gave the SNP credibility was the exploitation of Scotland’s North Sea energy resources in the 1970s (“It’s Scotland’s oil!”), yet such was the perversity of Sturgeon’s doctrinaire mindset that she was, within the limits of her devolved powers, attempting to shut down that valuable asset, at a time when energy security was heavily at risk, to the end of her career.

In a country with more problems than most other nations in Europe, the Scottish parliament has just completed legislation for the further restriction of hunting and necessary rural pest control, through an oppressive licensing system. Only the obsessions of the leftist SNP and its even more deluded Green allies were consistently addressed. That ultimately led to Sturgeon’s downfall, as her Gender Recognition Bill declared open season on 51 per cent of the electorate: Scotland’s women.

Yet, to the bitter end, at the press conference at which she announced her resignation, Nicola Sturgeon displayed the shameless contradiction of truth and reality that characterised her regime. “Though I know it will be tempting to see it as such,” she claimed, “this decision is not a reaction to short-term pressures. Of course there are difficult issues confronting the government just now, but when is that ever not the case?”

She denounced the “brutality” of modern politics, to which no force in Scotland has contributed more than the SNP (remember the hounding of Nigel Farage in Edinburgh). Most extravagantly, she claimed “there is now majority support” for independence, but that support “needs to be solidified”. In fact, the latest opinion poll, from Lord Ashcroft, with a larger than average sample of voters, shows independence rejected by a margin of 12 points (56 per cent to 44 per cent), a larger rejection of separatism than at the 2014 referendum.

That is Sturgeon’s one beneficial contribution to Scottish politics: that her toxic addiction to dictatorial legislation hugely eroded support for her other obsession of separatism. The majority support she claims for independence “needs to be solidified” by promoting it from the realm of fantasy to reality, a process which she actually reversed. She gave Scots an insight into the dystopian character of an independent Scotland with legislation that abolished the human rights of Scottish citizens by making them subject to arrest and imprisonment for uttering opinions deemed by her and other zealots to be “hate crimes”, even in the privacy of their own homes.

So far is Sturgeon from any self-awareness that she further claimed there are now “stronger protections for victims of domestic abuse, and parliament will soon consider legislation to improve access to justice for victims of rape and sexual offences”. That is breath-taking, coming from the woman who was only prevented by the intervention of the hated British state from intruding rapists into women’s prisons. Only a politician – a very poor politician – could utter such a claim with a straight face.

Nicola Sturgeon has inflicted some damage on her chosen target, the United Kingdom, creating a climate of division and hostility. But the worst damage by far that she perpetrated was against the people of Scotland, reduced in some instances to Third World public services and harassed by the prescriptions of a quasi-police state (public spaces covered with Big Brother notices exhorting the citizenry “Report…”). Scotland expanded its lead as the drug deaths capital of Europe on Sturgeon’s watch, but she did act to protect foxes and other vermin.

Sturgeon insists she will stay on as an MSP – an implausible scenario. After ruling as empress, she will not easily adapt to spear-carrier status. Do not be surprised if some “ambassadorial” or similarly lucrative job is suddenly offered by some extravagantly woke foundation. It is difficult to imagine her contesting the next Scottish election. Nor is there any obvious successor. Since she took the SNP from majority to minority government, dependent on the demented Greens, there is a real prospect of her party being ejected from government. Has Peak Nat passed? Only time will tell.

Enoch Powell famously said that all political careers end in failure. That thesis has been significantly boosted by the parlous trajectory of Nicola Sturgeon. The pity of it is that her personal failure has also impacted grievously on the stability, status and prosperity of Scotland.

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