Nicola Sturgeon is pulling the oldest trick in the book of spin: misdirection.
In her memoirs, Frankly, she reportedly says she has never considered her sexuality ‘binary’. I’m not sure what that means but whatever it is, I’m very happy for her.
What I’m less happy about is all the time we’re spending on the former first minister’s private life when it is her public life that matters.
For though I’ve no doubt Sturgeon would rather avoid a public conversation about her sexual orientation, which is no one else’s business after all, she would much rather avoid a public conversation about her legacy, and that is very much everyone’s business.
Cast your mind back to the turbulent months that followed Scotland’s decision in 2014 to remain part of the United Kingdom.
Alex Salmond resigned and Sturgeon became his successor as SNP leader without a single vote cast, and she was thereafter chosen by MSPs to become first minister of Scotland, the first woman to hold that office.
She embarked on her premiership amid widespread good will, swarmed for selfies everywhere she went, and receiving media coverage that bordered on the sycophantic. (A Vogue photoshoot, a slot on the Daily Show, and her own Hogmanay night on STV.
However did Sturgeon cope with the biased Unionist media?)
Many political successors only reach the throne in the dying days of their party’s reign.
That’s what happened with Gordon Brown and later Rishi Sunak.. Sturgeon’s coronation, however, came at the height of her predecessor’s powers.
Whatever she might think of him now, it was Salmond’s name that got her elected deputy leader, Salmond who made her a powerful second-in-command, Salmond who put her in charge of the day-to-day running of the Yes campaign, and Salmond who eventually (however reluctantly) made way for her leadership ambitions. Without him, most Scots would never have heard of her.
From Salmond she inherited a majority government, a divided opposition, and 45 per cent of voters in favour of independence.
She parlayed this into a landslide victory in the 2015 general election, leading the SNP to victory in all but three seats north of the border.
That is a signal achievement for which she deserves much credit. It is possible to argue that Sturgeon was a woeful first minister while acknowledging her considerable talents as a strategic operator.
She persuaded intergenerational Labour voters to abandon the party of their parents and grandparents, took the SNP to unprecedented heights in membership numbers, and packed concert arenas with adoring fans. She was a political star.
But it’s what you do with political stardom that matters, and Sturgeon did so little of merit considering the powers at her disposal and the opportunities handed her by opponents and chance.
For Nationalists, the first item on the charge sheet against her will always be this: she failed to deliver independence.
Despite Brexit. Despite unpopular Tory governments. Despite Jeremy Corbyn and a divided Labour party. Despite austerity.
Despite the Internal Market Act. Despite the pandemic. Despite Partygate. Despite the cost-of-living crisis. Despite Liz Truss.
Opportunity knocked and knocked but Nicola never answered.
Any relief Unionists might feel at her failure is tempered by her performance on the everyday matters of Scottish life.
She was the first minister who saw Scotland become the drugs deaths capital of Europe.
She pledged to close the attainment gap in education – asked to be judged on it, no less – and instead it widened on her watch.
As health secretary she introduced ‘legally binding’ treatment time targets that, as first minister, she watched being routinely missed.
She couldn’t get two ferries built and so she launched one with pretend windows instead. She touted her government’s world-leading climate targets but grew quiet every time emissions levels zoomed right on past them.
She put the rights of women and girls in jeopardy with her reckless, scientifically illiterate gender reforms, and left Westminster to step in and save female Scots from their own parliament.
As to the truth about the Salmond affair and the Holyrood inquiries that followed, we might never know the full story but it seems plain to me that we don’t know even half the story at this stage.
That is another legacy of Sturgeon’s first ministership: secrecy and resistance to transparency became hallmarks of the Edinburgh government on her watch.
Even so, there must be a reason she sought out a political career within Scottish nationalism. I’m sure she believes in independence in theory but in practice she showed herself more interested in self than in self-determination.
Similarly, her concerns about care-experienced young people and the educational opportunities of socially deprived children strike me as sincere, but she was not just a commentator.
She had the power to change things and yet she did so little of any consequence for anything other than her career. Sturgeon didn’t get to the top by herself but she seems to have got there only for herself.
Every politician I have ever discussed the matter with has said the same: the lowest point in government is better than the highest point in opposition.
For a simple reason: power. Government means the power to change things, to strip away old failing policy and install something new and up to scratch.
It’s not primarily an issue of legislating. That takes time and involves all sorts of hoops and hurdles. But ministers have everyday powers that can be exercised with the flick of a pen. The choice is not only whether to exercise those powers but how and to whose benefit.
Sturgeon made her choices and Scotland is still living with them years later.
It is not merely that she failed to improve her country, it’s that she left her country in a worse state than she found it. Schoolchildren, and particularly the poorest, were worse off because Sturgeon became first minister.
Scotland’s health service didn’t get the reform it needed to serve patients’ needs because Sturgeon ditched a career in law for one at Holyrood.
Amid the pandemic, a point at which Scottish businesses needed all the help they could get, she struck a pact with the Greens, took her government to the left and alienated entrepreneurs.
Last week she was warning against working with Donald Trump, but who would solicit her advice?
She obtained power, she did nothing with it, she has little to show for it. Sturgeon is in no position to be doling out lessons in what not to do in politics. She is the lesson.
For almost a decade, Nicola Sturgeon had the levers of power at her disposal, and although she made plenty of noise, the machinery of change seldom registered more than a murmur.
Hers was an epoch of idleness. Kitty Muggeridge once said David Frost ‘rose without a trace’. Sturgeon governed without one.
Now she speaks of frankness. It is a cause to which she is a decidedly late convert, but if she so wishes let’s be frank. Eleven years ago, she became first minister.
Unparalleled power, unmatched opportunities, a country for the improving. Eventually, she got a book advance out of it. What did Scotland get?
In an interview with a Sunday broadsheet, Sturgeon says she might move to London. Frankly, Scotland would be better off today if she’d done that eleven years ago.