Sturgeon’s comeback show wasn’t the sellout we expected

Alan Cochrane

Even though she’s been away for seven months, Scotland’s politicians can’t get used to losing their old boss Nicola Sturgeon. Making her first speech from the backbenches – and limited to only half the speaking time she’d been accustomed to – she was still addressed, wrongly, as “First Minister” by the Deputy Presiding Officer, while a Tory MSP called her “minister”.
However, for a party that’s been struggling without her, it might have been assumed that the SNP’s foot soldiers would have turned out in droves for what was being billed as her big comeback bid. Not a bit of it. Nicola Sturgeon’s first parliamentary performance since her arrest and subsequent release in June, pending further enquiries in the matter of the Missing Six Hundred Thousand, was delivered to an almost empty Holyrood chamber. To this observer, it suggested that in spite of all that’s happened to her and her party this year, she hasn’t given up on the idea of maintaining a serious political career. It was quite a performance, especially as here we had one of Britain’s hardest-nosed politicians appealing for less “acrimony and stalemate” in politics but also still insisting that she wants independence for Scotland.
Mind you, she did ask Tories and Labour if they could spare some more powers short of the actual break up of Britain. Overshadowing Wednesday’s events, as it has for two years, has been Police Scotland’s Operation Branchform – its investigation into what happened to all that money donated by SNP members but which has now vanished. As well as Sturgeon, her husband, Peter Murrell was also arrested and then freed, as was the SNP’s former treasurer. Nobody has been charged and Scotland’s prosecuting authority, the Crown Office, has not yet received the police report. The former first minister chose a debate on equality and child poverty for her return to the lectern and, like all backbenchers, was strictly limited to a six-minute speech, whereas the government front bench is allowed double that.
The debate came twenty-four hours after Humza Yousaf announced his programme for government – ridiculed by his opponents as more of a “tribute act” to Sturgeon, his former boss and mentor, than for any new measures it contained. Sturgeon was kept waiting by the Deputy Presiding Officer, Annabelle Ewing, before being allowed to speak but the latter made up for her mistake by initially referring to the lady who was used to being obeyed as “First Minister”. In her speech, Sturgeon said this was the first time in 17 years that she hadn’t been involved in her party’s programme for government as either first minister or deputy first minister, and added: “To say that my perspective on politics has altered would be an understatement.” And she went on in the same vein when she said: “Certain things look different – perhaps clearer – from here than from the trenches of the political frontline.” When we think of all that’s happened to her, as well as the astonishing drop in her party’s fortunes since she resigned as first minister in February she can say that again.