For those close friends who got a text from Nicola Sturgeon in the hours before she publicly announced her resignation as Scotland’s first minister, it was the timing and not the fact of her departure that came as the almighty shock.
But Sturgeon is a woman who likes to craft her own narrative. For months, the first minister has been buffeted by decisions not of her making – the supreme court ruling that she cannot hold a second independence referendum without Westminster approval, the UK government blocking Holyrood’s gender recognition bill – as domestic headwinds around the NHS, education and transport grew ever more unfavourable.
