On a chilly afternoon in November 2014, Nicola Sturgeon rose to her feet inside the Scottish parliament to deliver her maiden speech as First Minister. Wearing a sleek red dress, her hair immaculately coiffed, she lost no time in establishing her feminist credentials.
‘I hope my election does indeed open the gate to greater opportunity for all women,’ she told the chamber, her voice cracking with emotion.
‘I hope it sends a strong, positive message to all girls and young women across our land: there should be no limit to your ambition for what you can achieve.’
Her outfit and demeanour might have been a mirror image of yesterday’s resignation speech. And yet how different things appear on the other side of the looking-glass. Because a little over eight years on, the woman who started the job promising greater opportunities for the women of Scotland walks away having let every one of them down.
There was little reflection in Sturgeon’s self-serving resignation speech about the disastrous legacy she leaves behind. Not one word about the horrendous mess she has created with her Gender Recognition Reform Bill, or the culture of fear she has fostered within her own nationalist government when it comes to defending women’s rights.
Maiden speech: Nicola Sturgeon at Holyrood in 2014
Stand: Author JK Rowling accused Nicola Sturgeon of being a destroyer of women’s rights
Instead, her farewell was peppered with the tone-deaf arrogance that the nation has become so familiar with, a stubbornness that seems borne out of a refusal to admit she has done anything wrong.
And yet Sturgeon has left her party, and her country – the one she claimed to love so much it seemed almost to move her to tears – utterly divided.
It is a situation that could have barely seemed credible back in 2014. After all, in the aftermath of the referendum vote, which cracked deep fissures down the middle of our small nation, who could have imagined that the country could end up even more fractured in Sturgeon’s Scotland?
Like many women in this country, I was hugely cheered when Sturgeon took over from Alex Salmond. While I fundamentally disagreed with her on the issue of independence, she seemed smart and switched on, full of energy and new ideas, a welcome relief from the domineering old guard. A female First Minister seemed like an exciting new dawn for Scotland, and by extension for its women.
And yet it wasn’t long before the new First Minister was betraying just how much she had been made in the Salmond mould. Her hectoring, mocking style, that sardonic just-admit-I’m-right laugh, the belittling of her opponents and increasingly arrogant refusal to admit wrongdoing. It all felt eerily familiar, probably because it came straight from the Salmond playbook.
I remember being astounded when, after Salmond barked ‘behave yourself, woman’ to Conservative MP Anna Soubry in the Commons in 2015, Sturgeon leapt to his defence, claiming ‘there’s no man I know who is less sexist’.
It is telling that last month veteran Labour MSP Jackie Baillie remarked that in the years before Sturgeon’s ascension to the top job she did not ‘remember Nicola Sturgeon as a feminist ever,’ adding: ‘I think this has come about as a product of her being First Minister.’
Of course Sturgeon has always been good at window dressing, particularly when it comes to burnishing her own brand of lipstick feminism. Thus we have had, since her tenure, a 50/50 gender split cabinet, a decision which has lumbered us with such lame ducks as Angela Constance and Shona Robison (Sturgeon’s closest friend).
Then there is the baby box, a warm-the-cockles-of-your-progressive-heart idea that has cost a ridiculous amount and should only ever have been available to those on low incomes.
Many bought into it all, however. The New York Times described Sturgeon as ‘Scotland’s feminist First Minister’ while a BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour list named her the most powerful woman in the world.
She cultivated an image –sleek, well put-together, and never ostentatious. We got used to seeing her tippy-tapping onto TV sets, conference stages, SNP rallies, with all the confidence of a down to earth world leader who still had time for a smiley selfie with her hordes of adoring fans.
And yet it wasn’t long before the shine began to wear off the sleek, people-pleasing leader. She angered Nationalists with her heel-dragging over independence, while frustrating Unionists with her insistence that another referendum was the only way forward.
Her stubbornness over badly thought out policies such as the Named Person scheme spoke to a woman who refused to back down even when she knew she’d got it wrong, a personality trait which seemed to become ever more prevalent as she weathered storms from the ferries fiasco to the Covid care home scandal, the questions over that missing £600,000, to the Alex Salmond inquiry, from which she emerged badly bruised.
Outcry: Transgender rapist Isla Bryson was sent to a women’s jail
Protest: Women’s rights activists demonstrate outside Bute House
In November 2020, before a media blitz of self-serving selfies, meetings and pressings of the flesh at the Cop26 climate change conference in Glasgow (even back then, many wondered if she had been quietly polishing up a CV and was in the market for a new job), Sturgeon posed for British Vogue in designer outfits at Bute House.
In the accompanying interview, she reflected on the political departures of her some-time sparring partners including Ruth Davidson, Kezia Dugdale and Theresa May, telling the magazine: ‘I am the last woman standing.’
It was a poor choice of words. Because over the past year what Sturgeon has witnessed is the serried ranks of Scotland’s women, JK Rowling among them, standing up against her. Pained by her betrayal, furious the proposed GRR Bill – and the subsequent row after transgender rapist Isla Bryson was put in a women’s prison – would erode their rights, deny them safe spaces and take the women’s movement back a generation, they spoke up. They attended rallies and demanded to be heard.
Whatever Sturgeon may say now about no longer being able to give it her all, about it being the right time to go for personal reasons, deep down, she must know that it is her cavalier attitude to the same women she once said she had ‘opened the gate for’ that has cost her her career. That she doesn’t have the humility to admit it feels like a final betrayal.
We do not yet know where the GRR Bill goes from here. It is still possible Scotland’s women and girls may have to live with the legacy of Sturgeon’s disastrous final months forever. If so they will find their safety compromised and their rights eroded by a woman who once promised she’d have their backs.
In the coming weeks and months, as Sturgeon surveys the dying embers of her career, she may well reflect that the woman she has ultimately failed, is herself.
