On November 22, 2014, Nicola Sturgeon addressed 12,000 adoring fans at Glasgow’s SEE Hydro, two days after being sworn in as Scotland’s new first minister. The previous weekend, Lady Gaga had sold out the same venue.
Eight years and three months later, with five thumping SNP election victories under her belt, Sturgeon stood at a podium in her official Bute House residence and announced her resignation.
As she turned to leave, the BBC’s Glen Campbell fired one final question at her. Did she expect to be interviewed by police as part of an investigation into SNP finances?
Within two months, an evidence tent would be erected on her front lawn as detectives painstakingly searched the home she shared with her now estranged husband Peter Murrell. Sturgeon herself would be arrested the following June and released without charge.
As she confirms she is departing the political scene, both her supporters and critics will debate her legacy. But the final chapter in her political story is still to be written.
Health secretary
Before being appointed by Alex Salmond to a new brief overseeing the Scottish independence referendum in 2012, Sturgeon had been Scotland’s longest-serving health secretary.
Those who worked with her described her as committed and on top of the detail, and a few years into the job she managed a major swine flu outbreak. However, it is indisputable that the overall experience for NHS patients is worse than it was when she became health secretary in 2007.
In 2012 she introduced a treatment time guarantee, which was touted as a legally-binding assurance that patients would receive day case or inpatient procedures within 12 weeks of going on a waiting list, but it has been broken more than 600,000 times.
Meanwhile, nearly 100 times more NHS patients have been waiting over two years for hospital treatment in Scotland than in the whole of England.
More than 10,000 patients in Scotland have been waiting at least 104 weeks after referral for hospital treatment. They include inpatient, outpatient and day patients.
As health secretary, Sturgeon won a long-running legal battle to introduce minimum unit pricing for alcohol. On Wednesday she listed this, as well keeping under-threat accident and emergency departments open, among her most notable achievements.
However, another of her national missions — ending Scotland’s drug death scandal — was a failure. She admitted in 2021 that her government “took our eye off the ball” on the issue, with Scotland having by far the highest numbers of drug deaths in Europe.
The education mission
After becoming first minister, Sturgeon made education the first of what would turn out to be a succession of national missions.
In August 2015, she asked to be judged on her record and set a target to “completely” close a gap in attainment between children from rich and poor backgrounds. “If you are not, as first minister, prepared to put your neck on the line on the education of our young people then what are you prepared to [put it on the line for]? It really matters”, she said.
After appointing John Swinney as education secretary she initially flirted with radical reforms, but soon ran into opposition from the EIS, Scotland’s largest teaching union.
Rather than risk a row with the EIS a flagship education bill, which would have stripped councils of influence over schools, was scrapped and reforms were drastically watered down. Meanwhile, the union secured a double-digit pay increase for its members. But Scotland has continued to tumble down international education league tables.
While her allies claim progress has been made on closing the attainment gap, evidence is thin and even Sturgeon has admitted that she wished she had more success in this area.
Child payments — and The Promise
Sturgeon took control of a vast swathe of powers handed to Holyrood after the independence referendum. She raised income tax on middle-class Scots — a move, which contrary to some concerns within the party, did not cost the SNP significant support — and set about creating a Scottish welfare state.
Her flagship policy, the Scottish child payment, is now worth £26.70 per week for the parents of each eligible child. Anti-poverty campaigners have hailed the benefit as a significant policy which will make a meaningful difference to the lives of those from the poorest backgrounds.
Other interventions, such as providing a baby box of helpful items to new parents regardless of income, lack evidence that they had any impact as a public health measure.
Since resigning as first minister, one of the few matters Sturgeon took an active interest in at Holyrood has been The Promise — a pledge she made to drastically improve the lives of children in the care system by 2030.
A report last month said that Scotland was “behind schedule” to meet the goals of The Promise. Sturgeon had in January blamed “vested interests” for pushing back against the reforms.
Her emphasis on creating a “more compassionate” benefits system also placed an ever-increasing financial burden on her successors. Higher uptake rates and new benefits now cost the Scottish government an extra £1.3 billion a year — a figure projected to rise to at least £1.5 billion by 2029.
Covid-19 and the missing WhatsApps
To her admirers, the pandemic was Sturgeon’s finest hour. She presented a reassuring and empathetic daily presence on the nation’s TV screens and compared favourably against Boris Johnson, then the prime minister.
But despite putting in place more onerous restrictions on the public and businesses, there is very little to suggest that death rates in Scotland were meaningfully lower than in England.
Meanwhile, her deletion of Covid WhatsApp messages, meaning they could not be handed over to public inquiries, damaged her credibility.
Some of her actions during the pandemic, such as calling for another lockdown in December 2021, or predicting in 2022 that Scots would have to wear face masks for years to come, have not aged well.
Families are still waiting for answers about the scandal of care home deaths, in which thousands of patients were transferred from hospitals to care homes without being tested.
Evidence provided to the UK Covid inquiry also added weight to claims that Sturgeon had played politics with the pandemic, an allegation she strenuously denied. Correspondence revealed her officials had worried about the implications for EU membership and Scottish independence if travel restrictions were placed on Spain.
It also emerged that her chief of staff plotted with Sturgeon to create “good old-fashioned rammy” with the UK government about furlough.
Gender recognition
Sturgeon was responsible for championing what is probably the most contentious piece of legislation in Holyrood’s history.
Her plan to allow anyone aged 16 or over to change their legal sex by signing a declaration made her a hero to LGBT campaigners, but a pariah to increasingly vocal opponents.
The legislation had been years in the making, but Sturgeon failed to offer meaningful concessions to concerns, including fears that convicted sex offenders or those facing trial for rape would take advantage of the law.
An unprecedented SNP rebellion led to the resignation of Ash Regan, and nine of Sturgeon’s MSPs voting against her government.
Within weeks of the bill passing, Isla Bryson, a newly convicted double rapist, was sent to a women’s prison.
Anger at Sturgeon’s position turned to mockery when she repeatedly refused to say whether she believed Bryson, who began living as a woman only after being accused of rape, was a man or a woman.
On Wednesday, Sturgeon insisted that one day, society would look back in horror at the way trans people had been vilified, while also bemoaning the ferocity of the debate.
But her critics claim that she is as guilty as anyone for stoking a culture war, for example by infamously dismissing women’s concerns over self-ID as “not valid”.
Independence and SNP legacy
Sturgeon twice promised a new referendum on independence — in the aftermath of the Brexit vote and then after a landslide SNP win in the 2019 election — but on both occasions did not deliver.
The UK government repeatedly rejected her demands for indyref2 and she failed to build public support for independence.
Backed into a corner, Sturgeon declared in 2022 that she would turn the next general election into a “de facto referendum”. Until then, the idea that had gained traction only on the fringes of the nationalist movement.
Her strategy — to go to the Supreme Court to seek a ruling over whether Holyrood had the power to hold an independence referendum — backfired when the UK’s top judges unequivocally ruled that it did not.
Humza Yousaf, her preferred successor as first minister, struggled in the job and ditched many of Sturgeon’s contentious policies.
He was brought down after abruptly axing another of his predecessor’s bequests, the coalition deal she had signed to bring the left-wing Scottish Greens into government.
It was Swinney who led the SNP into last year’s general election disaster.
But few saw Sturgeon, who watched on as a highly-paid ITV election night pundit as loss after loss for the SNP rolled in, as blameless for the result. The party’s seat tally fell from 48 to nine, leaving her dream of independence on life support.
