Wounded but secure: Nicola Sturgeon rides out Salmond storm

There have been moments in the past few weeks when some opponents of Scottish independence dared to hope that first minister Nicola Sturgeon’s bitter rift with her predecessor Alex Salmond might be the saving of Scotland’s 313-year-old union with England.

“What irony if the wounded Queen of Scots Nicola Sturgeon becomes the reason the union survives,” declared a headline over a Daily Mail article last week by former BBC broadcaster Andrew Neil. The former “mistress of all she surveyed”, Neil wrote, had “morphed into a wounded bear”.

But despite the publication of a parliamentary committee report that strongly criticised Sturgeon and her government’s handling of the sexual harassment complaints against her former mentor Salmond, her position as Scotland’s first minister appears secure.

Academics and analysts went even further suggesting that her pro-independence Scottish National party’s hopes of a landslide in crucial May elections were still alive.

“The story has lost its legs,” said John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde university and one of the leading experts on UK public opinion.

I think this will largely reinforce attitudes — if you were pro-SNP you are likely to still be pro-SNP

In its report, published early on Tuesday, a majority of the committee’s members concluded that Sturgeon had misled them about an April 2018 meeting with Salmond at which the complaints were discussed, a potential breach of the Scottish ministerial code.

But the impact of that charge may have been blunted by leaks that made the committee easy to portray as politically partisan. A separate inquiry by former top Irish prosecutor James Hamilton published a day earlier ruled that Sturgeon had not breached the code.

Curtice said controversy surrounding the Salmond complaints might have knocked 3-5 percentage points off the SNP’s support, but added the party might now gain the losses back and thereby secure a rare majority in Scottish parliamentary elections on May 6.

“Insofar as the opposition have invited people to concentrate on Nicola Sturgeon and her probity, they have focused on one of the SNP’s principle assets . . . she is far more popular than her opponents,” Curtice said.

Paul Cairney, professor of politics and public policy at Stirling university, said that while the affair had raised questions about the Scottish government’s ability to regulate itself and the parliament’s ability to overcome its partisan divisions, most voters would be unmoved.

“I think this will largely reinforce attitudes — if you were pro-SNP you are likely to still be pro-SNP,” Cairney said. “I don’t see it changing many minds.”

Andy Maciver, a lobbyist and former head of communications for the Scottish Conservatives, said the party had misjudged its attack on Sturgeon. “I think the public will move on from this quite quickly,” he said. “I wouldn’t at all be surprised if you see the SNP’s poll ratings rising again.”

In a further boost to her position, Sturgeon on Tuesday afternoon easily defeated by 65 votes to 31 a vote of no confidence against her in the Edinburgh parliament put forward by the opposition Scottish Conservatives.

The first minister has been buoyed by the lack of support from either inquiry for Salmond’s claim to have been the target of a “malicious and concerted” effort to remove him from public life by her closest associates including her husband — and SNP chief executive — Peter Murrell.

Salmond cited as evidence messages among SNP officials, including one by Murrell in 2019 in which he suggested it would be good to be “pressurising” police over the accusations of sexual misconduct by the former first minister.

Murrell has denied being part of any conspiracy and the parliamentary committee agreed unanimously that the context of the message supported his account. Other messages between SNP officials were merely “supportive in nature or involved individuals commentating on external events”, the committee said.

Still, neither Sturgeon nor her minority SNP government have come through the controversy unscathed.

The parliamentary inquiry report on Tuesday highlighted the “fundamental errors” committed during the civil service-led investigation into Salmond and the disastrous failed attempt to defend it against his legal challenge, a failure that cost taxpayers more than £500,000.

In January 2019, the Scottish government was forced to concede in court that its investigation into harassment complaints against Salmond by two civil servants had been unlawful because it was “procedurally unfair” and “tainted by apparent bias”. At a criminal trial last year, the former first minister was acquitted of all 13 sexual offence charges against him.

The parliamentary inquiry was also unanimously critical of the government’s reluctance to hand over legal advice and other key information when asked.

“It is simply unacceptable that a committee of the parliament has had repeatedly to seek documents and to extend deadlines for receiving the information,” the committee said.

Critics of the first minister cited the conclusion of a majority of the committee’s members that she did not tell them the truth when she claimed to have told Salmond at their first meeting that she would not intervene in the investigation as he wanted.

Both inquiries accepted, however, that Sturgeon did not actually intervene, with Hamilton dismissing Salmond’s argument that she should have done so. “[Intervention] would certainly have been both legally and politically impossible even had the first minister wished to make it, which clearly she did not,” Hamilton, the former head of the Irish public prosecution service, said.

The rift between Sturgeon and Salmond has exacerbated tensions within the SNP over what some critics of the first minister see as her too-cautious strategy for pursuing independence and her government’s plans to make it easier for trans people to get official recognition of their preferred gender.

Strains among independence supporters have become increasingly public, with the political blog Wings Over Scotland, which includes elected SNP politicians among its contributors, now routinely portraying Sturgeon as a tyrannical figure who is the main obstacle to Scottish independence.

On Monday, blog author and Sturgeon critic Stuart Campbell denounced Hamilton’s report clearing the first minister as “utterly mad and ludicrous”. “Independence is over. All is destroyed,” Campbell wrote.