Shocking Twist: How Nicola Sturgeon’s Absolute Triumph Led to Her Ultimate Downfall

Nicola Sturgeon’s great political achievement was in making the abnormal seem normal. It has made support for Scottish independence – a political project that takes the costs of Brexit and raises them – a natural home for the bereaved Remainer Scots and, not, shall we say, the equivalent of responding to the loss of a hand by cutting off both legs and one arm.

The most effective politicians always manage to create a reality distortion field around them, and Sturgeon was no different. The halo even managed to survive his tenure: his abrupt resignation as prime minister was described by many commentators as a refreshing change, rather than, as was obvious even then, the act of a politician whose project was running out of road and whose party was increasingly ungovernable.

During the ensuing contest, Kate Forbes, her finance minister, was described as a rational choice. Forbes’ tone, to remind you, was that the money he signed up for as finance minister had been badly spent, that the government’s public policy was disastrous, that its social policies were sinful, but that these were prices that were worth it. pay for the grand prize of wresting Scotland from the legal, political and social union of which it has been a part for three centuries. Furthermore, Forbes’ social attitudes have placed her far from the median opinion and her support pool in the parliamentary party has dwindled to a weak point. Just a still cheated media class Of sturgeon charisma might have seen that candidacy as sensible, or a party membership that came perilously close to electing her as anything but rash.

Sturgeon’s distortion field also means that the Scottish National Party – Still! – manages to avoid awkward questions about whether the UK crisis, triggered by Liz Truss’s disastrous budget, might also suggest real limits to an independent Scotland’s short-term ability to do even a quarter of the things it promised to do .

The pitch applied not only to his political project but also to the personal details of his leadership. While political parties generally fared poorly in relation to all but the most eccentric businesses, even by such standards, the internal arrangements of the SNP were unusual.

Her husband, Peter Murrell, who has been the party’s chief executive since 1999, remained in charge throughout her leadership. Across the Western world, more and more high-achieving people have spouses who are themselves very powerful, yet shockingly few of them would be able to convince a board of directors or their shareholders to accept such a close level of closeness outside of a family business, rightly so.

Yet this close relationship was treated by the party as just another well-connected couple. This has remained the case even when the organization’s treasurer resigned stating that he did not “receive the financial support or information” to fulfill the role and was replaced by his predecessor. None of this is normal, and everything is so far from best practice that it would take a rocket ship to achieve it. It is a measure of Sturgeon’s political skills that it took an arrest and a police tent in a garden for the situation to be widely called into question.

But this abnormal disposition existed for a reason. Sturgeon was simply the heir to a party that had long been run as a small clique. Similarly Alex Salmond, his mentor turned rival and de facto founder of the modern SNP, ran the party from a small circle (of which Sturgeon and Murrell were both members).

One reason is that running the SNP as a small clique has historically proven to be the only way to make it an effective electoral force, and it’s no wonder. The SNP is a party engaged in a very painful breach of the functioning of Scotland with a long time frame, an uncertain outcome and a series of significant disagreements about what to do next. It contains wider ideological and strategic divisions – on everything from defense to social policy to the economy – than any other major party in the UK.

Concentrating power in this way helped facilitate Sturgeon’s great success. He allowed her to position the SNP as a normal centre-left party and Scottish independence as an escape from the chaos and cuts in Westminster, instead of voting to turbocharge both. But it also means that as the questions swirl around the party, it’s hard for her or her successors to escape the suspicion that they were at worst actively complicit or at best surprisingly curious about the inner workings of the party. It also means that the internal divisions which Salmond and Sturgeon have so successfully hidden from public view could become a prominent and scarring feature of Scottish politics for some time.

stephen.bush@ft.com