Nicola Sturgeon has reached the stage many long-serving leaders do: she is pulling the levers but nothing is happening.
Enoch Powell averred that all political careers end in failure and it's typically the failure that ends the political career. Failure to lead or inspire, to convince or cajole, to change circumstances or change to meet them. All of a sudden, the music cuts out in the middle of the waltz and the only question is whether the exit from the dance floor is graceful or ignominious.
Sturgeon's number is still playing but the unmistakeable cracks and croaks of the band growing tired can be heard. There will be no abrupt flit from Bute House any time soon but an enterprising removals firm might want to start putting flyers up around Charlotte Square.
The First Minister's inability to exert her authority over circumstances can be seen in another round of horrific drugs death statistics, the burgeoning crisis in access to non-Covid healthcare, supply chains disrupted and businesses blaming the Scottish Government's exemption rules, the ongoing failure to turn around Scottish education and the systemic breakdown in ministers' responsibility to the islands that is the ferries debacle. The causes of these failings are discrete but they are all thematic of a leader who is finding it harder to lead.
Sturgeon's frustration refluxed so hard last week that she spat great gobs of acid at reporters. Ask why all fortysomethings were not vaccinated, when Sturgeon had vowed they would have been 'given' both jabs by late July, she erupted in indignation, scolding the press for not interpreting 'given' to mean 'offered', then snipping: 'I assume a certain level of intelligence on the part of people listening to me'.
It was a telling remark. Her admirers invested heavily in the fantasy of Sturgeon as heroic icon and ethical lodestar — Wonder Woman meets Mother Teresa — and, somewhere along the way, the idol has bought into her own graven image. She could not have misspoken; everyone else must be wrong. She could not be failing the most vulnerable, desperate people in the country because that would be callous and she is compassion itself. The woman and the brand are blurring into one.
The First Minister is not a bad person and she's not a monster. She's almost none of the things routinely said about her in the cesspits of social media, where you will find a middle-of-the-road ex-solicitor cast as a modern-day Führer and referred to in terms specially reserved for women who get ideas above their station. All this fury, all this invective, when a cursory survey of her 14 years in office yields a far more damning assessment: Sturgeon just isn't very good at the job. A talented politician, undoubtedly, but a hopeless technocrat. Peerless if you're after a soundbite or a selfie but not someone you'd turn to for reform or results.
Just as her fans have mythologised Sturgeon, so too have her haters, who have done almost as much to make her seem unbeatable as the woman herself. They have built her up into an invincible enemy in the same way the Left did Margaret Thatcher but, like Thatcher, Sturgeon's grasp on power is contingent on political circumstance, which always appears fixed in the moment but can be swept aside by the smallest change.
When such changes are afoot, a strong leader may be able to convince her own ranks or the general public or even both that there is no alternative. Sturgeon is not a strong leader and her weakness is contributing to the impression that there are capable alternatives. As First Minister, she has fostered a culture of immunity from the consequences of political failure, so that her ministers seldom need to go even when they err grievously. Failure without consequences inevitably produces more failure and in Sturgeon's government it lends undue credibility to mediocre ministers. Where Lincoln was said to be strengthened by his 'team of rivals', Sturgeon's team of write-offs increases the likelihood of future government foul-ups and, perversely, ensures the fouler-uppers remain prominent enough to present themselves one day as challengers for the crown.
It won't be long before the pretenders start eyeing up the throne and, when they do, expect to hear a lot of talk about 'leadership'. Whether it's hardline separatists, implacable Unionists or the stubborn middle ground, you hear essentially the same complaint about Sturgeon: she is off her game. For nationalists, she is not making enough progress on a second referendum. For unionists, she is making too much progress. For the middle, she is listless and starting to lose touch with them. No one can follow a leader who is standing still and wouldn't know which direction to go in even if she weren't.
The Sturgeon trap is a snare of her own devising, albeit one constructed inadvertently, and it threatens to clamp its jaws around Sturgeon's premiership whichever direction she turns. Step towards her base and she will motivate her opponents' voters; step back from her hard-won coalition and it could begin to crumble. Step in any direction on policy, delivery and outcomes and she risks becoming entangled in more failures that hurt the very floating voters she needs to hold onto.
The next Scottish Parliament poll, scheduled for 2026, will mark a milestone: for the first time, there will be voters in a Holyrood election who have lived their entire lives under an SNP government. What story does Sturgeon have to tell them? What achievements can she pray in aid when asking for their ballot?
There is a new generation coming up for whom Sturgeon's victim-nationalism, in which Scotland is forever done down and can never do for itself, will seem baleful and old-fashioned. Well-represented within this demographic will be youngsters for whom independence is not a romantic destination that has been struggled towards for generations but an obvious, natural state of affairs. They will be as likely to resent the SNP for still not having got there as they are the UK Government for not clearing a path for them.
Frustrating though it may be for non-nationalists to hear, the failure of leadership that most acutely jeapordises Sturgeon's position is that among her own supporters. Those ranks are held together by the promise that independence lies around the corner, a vow that is becoming frayed around the edges. The challenge to Sturgeon's leadership has little to do with anything Douglas Ross or Anas Sarwar says. It is from within her own hierarchy that danger approaches.
As the political historian David Torrance observed in 2015, while devolution had appeared to settle the long-running gradualist-vs-fundamentalist dispute in the former's favour, the dizzying new heights to which the SNP had attained — a majority government at Holyrood, all but three Scottish seats at Westminster — was reopening old wounds.
The dividing line was now timing rather than tactics, with Gradualism 2.0 counselling patience until a referendum victory was all but guaranteed and the neo-fundies urging speedy exploitation of political circumstances in which England had voted Tory, Scotland swung decisively behind the Nationalists and a booming SNP had organisational and financial advantages over a bruised and battle-worn Unionist camp.
Torrance noted 'a few of the new fundamentalists believe Ms Sturgeon might end up getting rather too comfortable as leader of an increasingly powerful devolved Scottish Government, leading to a further loss of urgency when it comes to another vote on independence'.
Sturgeon can fail and fail again as First Minister, knowing she has a constituency of staunchly pro-independence voters to fall back on, but if she loses them, her leadership falls apart. The experience of Alba's electoral drubbing suggests mass membership transfers from one party to the other are unlikely, and so the only way to separate Sturgeon from her supporters is to separate them from within by shattering their confidence in the current leader and giving them a new one to believe in.
Sturgeon's high toleration for failure means there are plenty waiting in the wings whose inadequacies have never got in the way of their ambitions. Unless she plans her own, dignified, departure, one of them will eventually work up the gumption to say she's had her day and the SNP needs new leadership for a new era.
Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on August 2, 2021.