The speed and suddenness of Nicola Sturgeon’s departure have left almost everyone in Holyrood and Westminster stunned
(Picture: PA)She is the best communicator among Britain’s (in post) political leaders, a genuine lover of books and the arts, the outstanding Scottish politician of her generation — and, in the space of a few short moments on a Wednesday morning, soon to be yesterday’s news.
Nobody really saw this coming. There were without doubt awkward recent missteps and deeper problems. But, even so, the speed and suddenness of Nicola Sturgeon’s departure have left almost everyone in Holyrood and Westminster stunned.
So how did the darling of the Scottish National Party (SNP) come to a decision that would not only shock her party but also put her whole political movement in peril?
Here — from her early days in Ayrshire, to her time in power as Scottish First Minister — is everything you need to know about Sturgeon.
Hiding under the table at birthday parties
Sturgeon was born on July 19, 1970 in Ayrshire, south-west of Glasgow.
Her mother was a dental nurse and her father an electrician, and both supported the SNP. She grew up in a terraced council house and is one of two daughters.
Somewhat surprisingly, she was the quieter one — or “the sensible one” — as her younger sister Gillian puts it. The future Scottish leader actually did have a childhood shy side: she spent her fifth birthday hiding under the table while other guests partied.
More recognisably, from a young age Sturgeon had a love of books.
“I lived in a house where I was surrounded by books, and I much preferred to sit with my head in a book than talking to people,” she once said.
It’s a love she still has today. More than almost any other politician in the country, Sturgeon seems to have a deep affection for books.
A teenage goth-adjacent phase followed. Sturgeon told one interviewer: “If you see pictures of me back then, you would struggle to know whether I was a boy or a girl.”
Her weekends were spent at the enticingly named Frosty’s Ice Disco in Irvine, a town close to the village of Dreghorn in which she lived.
Alongside a love of Wham! and Duran Duran, Sturgeon also had a growing interest in politics.
By the age of 16, having earlier joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Sturgeon joined the SNP. She was pushed into doing so by the presumption of a schoolteacher, who assumed she would join the Labour party.
Another source of motivation for her deepening interest in politics was a little unorthodox: Margaret Thatcher.
“Thatcher was prime minister, the economy wasn’t in great shape, lots of people around me were looking at a life or an immediate future of unemployment,” Sturgeon told Women’s Hour in 2013, continuing: “and I think that certainly gave me a strong sense of social justice and, at that stage, a strong feeling that it was wrong for Scotland to be governed by a Tory government that we hadn’t elected.”
Her rise in the SNP was swift: she became the youngest ever parliamentary candidate in Scotland at the 1992 general election (at the tender age of 21), standing for the party in Glasgow Shettleston. While she lost and such selections do not always guarantee future success, it was an auspicious beginning for a future superstar.
In the meantime, her education was going smoothly. She studied at state schools and then undertook a law degree at the University of Glasgow, from where she graduated in 1992. Until the age of 29, she worked at the Glasgow Drumpchapel Law Centre.
Climbing the ladder
Sturgeon became a full-time politician in 1999. She won a seat in the newly created Scottish Parliament, where she joined Alex Salmond’s shadow cabinet as shadow minister for Children and Education.
On the front bench — the SNP were the official opposition to the Labour-Liberal coalition in Holyrood at the time — Sturgeon held several positions. She grew worried, though, and told one interviewer about the extra pressures placed on female politicians. “Every time a woman politician goes in front of a camera, there are maybe 100 things that she has to worry about, consciously or subconsciously, that a man will never have to have cross his mind,” she said.
In the Scottish Parliament, Sturgeon garnered the nickname of “nippy sweetie” (a way of saying she was perhaps a bit too serious and sharp). While the SNP’s fortunes were improving, they were a far cry from the dominant party in Scottish politics that we know today. That began to change in 2004, though.
After the SNP’s leader John Swinney resigned, Sturgeon put herself forward for the leadership. But when Salmond, who had already led the party once (from 1990 to 2000) announced his intention to stand — and offered Sturgeon the deputy leadership — she said yes. One of the most formidable double acts in British politics was formed. But it wasn’t the only power pairing Sturgeon was involved in.
Married life
In 2003 she worked with her future husband, Peter Murrell, who is now chief executive of the SNP, on improving how the party campaigned. They had met in Aberdeenshire eight years earlier, at an SNP youth weekend (oh, the romance). Their work together on the 2003 project blossomed into something more — a series of dates soon took place after the formal work ceased.
There were newspaper reports the following year that the pair were an item. Five years after that, in 2009, Murrell proposed on New Year’s Eve and in 2010 they married at the Glasgow venue Òran Mór. Sturgeon calls her husband “Mr Absolutely Calm and Collected” and once revealed: “If I’m having a flap about something and he comes in the room, that in itself will often calm me down.”
The pair have no children and Sturgeon has spoken about the pain of a miscarriage in 2011. She said in one interview it was “not the case” that she had made decisions for the sake of her career. “It’s so complex. In my life, the not wanting to have kids, the not being able to have kids, having the miscarriage — these have all been true at different points.”
Reaching the top rungs
On the political scene, as the SNP deputy leader Sturgeon’s star continued to rise. Salmond was an MP in Westminster, so Sturgeon led the SNP in Holyrood, where she could take centre stage questioning the Labour/Liberal administration.
And in 2007, when the SNP won the Scottish Parliament election (though not an outright majority), she became Scotland’s Deputy First Minister and health secretary. Her work in the latter role saw her stop A&E closures and scrap charges for prescription drugs. Sturgeon also had the stressful task of leading the coverage and response to swine flu during a global outbreak in 2009 — as the first cases detected in the UK were found in Scotland.
Her political stock continued to rise. By 2011, the SNP had won an outright majority in the Scottish Parliament. Soon after that, Sturgeon became Cabinet Secretary for Infrastructure and — importantly — led the SNP’s referendum campaign before the 2014 vote on whether Scotland should stay in the UK or leave.
Snatching victories from the jaws of defeats
The 2014 referendum, though lost, was something of a personal triumph for Sturgeon, as well as her boss Salmond. The SNP and Yes campaign pushed the No side harder than anybody had thought possible. In particular, a poll during the campaigning period that showed ‘Yes’ winning spooked Westminster deeply.
When the dust settled, although ostensibly nothing had changed, Scottish independence was not only on the agenda, but also seemed like something that might conceivably happen within only a few years. Sturgeon and Salmond took a lot of the credit for that and, when the latter stood down as SNP leader, Sturgeon smoothly replaced him unopposed, on October 15, 2014.
The general election of 2015 pushed her star to what we now know was its height. In May that year, the SNP took a staggering 56 out of 59 Scottish seats at Westminster, a gain of 50. Sturgeon’s party — which she led with increasingly formidable skill and sophistication — had wiped out the other major parties with ease. It seemed the world was her oyster.
The third great boon for Sturgeon arrived the next year — though in hindsight, this now appears less of a gift than it did at the time.
While all of Britain voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, Scotland, taken as a whole, did not. More than 60 per cent of Scots had voted Remain. It looked like the perfect excuse to reopen the case of Scottish independence had arrived.
Days after the Brexit vote, Sturgeon announced plans to speak to EU member states directly to “protect Scotland’s relationship with the EU and our place in the Single Market”.
Seven years on, and following her resignation this morning, the hopes among nationalists that Brexit would provide a silver bullet in the search for independence look to have been dashed.
Governing Scotland — problems set in
While all these huge electoral events were taking place, Sturgeon had of course taken over from Salmond as First Minister of Scotland in 2014. Her first two years were relatively smooth — and she was proud of her gender-balanced Cabinet — but the SNP lost their majority in the 2016 Scottish parliamentary elections. Nonetheless, they were still the largest party and she formed another government.
But problems mounted over the years. Critics have pointed to serious problems with drug deaths (a record 1,339 were announced for 2020); widening attainment gaps between rich and poor students; ferry contracts given to firms that struggle to put out boats; and problems at newly built hospitals.
Teflon Sturgeon
For years, though, it seemed little could touch Sturgeon. In 2019, her predecessor Salmond was beset by a complex scandal (he resigned after sexual harassment complaints, though was later found not guilty on many charges, not proven on another, while yet another charge was dropped).
Sturgeon was dragged in to the affair — she was investigated for breaching the ministerial code (in 2021 an independent investigation cleared her of doing this) — but survived with her reputation largely intact. Her political opponents were spitting feathers, however, as she appeared to live a politically charmed life.
Sudden fall
Until, that is, her shock announcement this morning. Commentators are pointing to two recent issues: Sturgeon’s decision to declare the next UK General Election as a “de facto” independence referendum. The idea did not go down well within the SNP, whose MPs for years had impressed political watchers with their iron-message discipline and refusal to attack publicly their own party.
That discipline has been further eroded and the party’s unwillingness to have public fights has been turned on its head by rows about the Gender Recognition Bill. Former SNP frontbencher Joanna Cherry has been a prominent critic from the sidelines, but it is the row over transgender prisoner Isla Bryson that has seriously damaged Sturgeon.
This morning, though, she pointed to different reasons. “Though I know it will be tempting to see it as such, 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? So if this was just a question of my ability or my resilience to get through the latest period of pressure I wouldn’t be standing here today, but it’s not.
“This decision comes from a deeper and longer-term assessment. I know it may seem sudden, but I have been wrestling with it, albeit with oscillating levels of intensity for some weeks.”
What now for one of the UK’s most effective communicators? Perhaps she could work on a book of her own — or find a radio or TV show from which she could make the case for independence in a different form.
Whatever she does, it will be worth watching.
