Is Nicola Sturgeon in the clear?

Sean O’Grady considers what the future holds for the first minister after her battle with Alex Salmond

Sturgeon gives evidence in Holyrood this week (PA)

Now that Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon have both given lengthy testimony to the Scottish parliamentary inquiry into the events of recent years, things may go a little quiet. The opposition parties will continue to press the Scottish government by tabling questions and confidence votes, and they will demand more documents be disclosed, but the main action is probably fine. Further witnesses seem unlikely to add much that is conclusive to the areas presently in dispute.

For the next few weeks, then, the committee of MSPs, divided on partisan lines, will try to move forward to a conclusion about how the Scottish government handled its response to allegations about the behaviour of Salmond when he was first minister; and also how and why the Scottish government fought against the judicial review into the investigation that Salmond launched in 2018. Or, to put it into lurid but understandable terms, did Nicola Sturgeon engage in some conspiracy to “get” her predecessor as SNP party leader and first minister?

As the saying goes, the jury is out.

There is also a second quite separate independent inquiry led by James Hamilton QC, a former director of public prosecutions for Ireland, on the narrow point of whether Sturgeon broke the Scottish ministerial code. Of acute interest is what he decides to say about whether Sturgeon lied to the Scottish parliament.

Both reports should be made public in the coming weeks, and both will probably make for uncomfortable reading for Sturgeon, who presided over proceedings that were not exactly case studies in probity and efficient administration. The only question is how bad the reports will be, and whether her resignation would be required. The parliamentary committee, chaired by SNP MSP Linda Fabiani, has a good number of Sturgeon supporters on it, and is likely to be more equivocal and fall short of calling for her to go. The Hamilton inquiry may well be more critical in all senses.

The resignation of a first minister for such reasons is unprecedented since devolution in 1999, although Henry McLeish had to go after a financial scandal in 2001. It has to be said that there is no great groundswell for her removal coming up from the Scottish public, and Sturgeon’s and the SNP’s poll ratings remain fairly high. Sturgeon is widely thought to have done comparatively well during the Covid crisis, despite persistent questions about deaths in care homes and the fact that relevant data is broadly similar to the rest of the UK. She also has no obvious successor from the SNP, and the opposition parties have been generally weak and leaderless. Scottish Labour’s new leader, Anas Sarwar, offers some hope of a modest Labour revival.

It is possible that this long-running and sometimes bewildering internecine war will at least damage the SNP and take the edge off its current advantage in the elections for the Scottish parliament in May. The two reports into the Salmond-Sturgeon imbroglio will be well in the public domain by then.

For Sturgeon, it is crucial that her party secures a clear majority and unequivocal mandate from the Scottish voters to pursue a second referendum on independence. To do that she will have to demonstrate further that the SNP could guide Scotland safely to its destiny, and that she could negotiate deals with London and Brussels. In fact, Sturgeon is more likely to resign if she suffers a significant setback at the elections than from either of the official inquiries. The stakes for her, her party and her nation could scarcely be higher.