What next for Nicola Sturgeon?

Sean O’Grady explains why the first minister won’t be leaving her post just yet – but the fight for Scottish independence has been dealt a blow

Nicola Sturgeon during First Minister’s Questions at the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood, Edinburgh, on Thursday (PA)

It has long been a political convention across democracies that when someone lies to parliament, they have to resign their position. That’s about as clear as it gets, however. In the case of whether Nicola Sturgeon lied to the Scottish parliament about the Salmond affair, there is also now the question of who decides and what the exact test is for “misleading”. Is it the committee of MSPs who will report imminently, and whose proceedings have been leaked? Or is it the independent QC specially charged by Ms Sturgeon herself with answering the question? And if she did lie or mislead the Scottish parliament (and thus the Scottish people) did she do so “knowingly” or deliberately? How can one tell? And how important do they – parliament and people – think any of this is, anyway? There are no protest marches or riots in the streets calling for Sturgeon to go; quite the opposite, with many unable to follow the technical, procedural lawyerly wrangling. Covid and Brexit feel like bigger deals.

For what it’s worth, here are the relevant stentorian passages in section 1.3 of the Scottish Ministerial Code:

“It is of paramount importance that Ministers give accurate and truthful information to the Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity. Ministers who knowingly mislead the Parliament will be expected to offer their resignation to the First Minister;

“Ministers should be as open as possible with the Parliament and the public, reflecting the aspirations set out in the Report of the Consultative Steering Group on the Scottish Parliament. They should refuse to provide information only in accordance with the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 and other relevant statutes.”

Read more:

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Did Ms Sturgeon abide by these strictures and her own high standards?

The MSPs have split on party lines, with the four SNP members backing their chief and the view she did not mislead anyone, and the five others (Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat and independent) taking the line that she did mislead them, and thus parliament. Ms Sturgeon has dismissed it as premature – the report’s not even been published – and just a bit of a partisan game. Yet the MSPs, in a majority report, do sound like they actually did her a bit of a favour by omitting adverbs such as “knowingly” or “deliberately” to condition the misleading MSPs, still less “lying”, a blunt instrument. This would leave the way open for Ms Sturgeon to make a grovelling apology but allow her to keep her job. Her party would probably still carry the parliament and win a vote of confidence in the first minister.

Ms Sturgeon though has a second chance at political survival. If the other report by James Hamilton QC is kinder to her, she will be in an even stronger position. Much will depend on the precise form of words, the weight the learned gentleman places in various bits of evidence and so on. As with the MSPs, it is a matter of who knew what and when, and a good deal of that is one person’s word against another, though there are also texts and other corrobative details that point in different directions. What test, ie what burden of proof and certainty the QC chooses to measure Ms Sturgeon’s integrity, is also unclear, but it should be balance of probabilities rather than beyond reasonable doubt.

As with all official reports, the verdicts of the MSPs and the QC will be modulated and nuanced, and the protagonists will be able to selectively quote parts of each document to justify their actions. The broader picture, though, is clearer. The image of Scottish politics and those at the top of the SNP has been tarnished, whatever the legalistic arguments about what “misleading parliament” actually translates into in practice. As Ms Sturgeon wrote in her own introduction to the Scottish Ministerial Code in 2018:

“I will lead by example in following the letter and spirit of this Code, and I expect that Ministers and civil servants will do likewise.”

No one could claim that the Salmond affair is a case study in good governance and efficient administration, or that it lives up to the highest of ideals, and it reflects badly on Ms Sturgeon, who has already admitted mistakes. In other words, it is undeniable that she, her party and, to a degree, the cause of independence would be better off if none of this had ever happened. It may, at the margin, do enough damage to rob the SNP of a decent majority at the election in May, and thus a “mandate” to seek a second referendum on independence.

The aftermath of the Salmond affair does not have to destroy Ms Sturgeon and force her to resign to do the really important damage to her political mission – to regain Scottish nationhood. She and Alex Salmond would have to agree that independence is bigger than both of them, and it is now less likely to happen than it was even a few weeks ago.