Sturgeon may have won the battle, but the war is far from over

The first minister can breathe a small sigh of relief for now, writes Sean O’Grady, but the true test will come at the ballot box

Nicola Sturgeon takes a drink as she gives evidence to a committee earlier this month (AFP/Getty)

The verdict of the independent inquiry into Nicola Sturgeon’s behaviour during the Salmond affair could not be clearer: “I am of the opinion that the first minister did not breach the provisions of the ministerial code in respect of any of these matters.”

The “verdict”, determined by James Hamilton QC, former attorney general of Ireland, cannot be challenged on the grounds that he is partisan or otherwise unreliable. Unlike the committee of Scottish parliamentarians, with an opposition majority, who narrowly found that Ms Sturgeon had offered “inaccurate” evidence to them, and thus arguably misled the parliament, the Hamilton judgment is unequivocal, and relates precisely to the terms of the ministerial code. This requires ministers never to knowingly mislead MSPs, and plainly Ms Sturgeon did not.

It gets better for Ms Sturgeon. Overplaying their hand, the Scottish Conservatives gambled on a more damning report coming out, and had already tabled a vote of no confidence in the first minister. With the SNP and the Greens backing her she will win that vote, cementing her victory and uniting her own party, at least cosmetically. By the end of the day Ms Sturgeon will be able to say that she has been vindicated by an independent inquiry and has the confidence of parliament, which now goes into recess, ready to launch the SNP campaign for the Holyrood elections on 3 May. Ms Sturgeon will be hoping for a fresh overall majority, a personal vote of confidence from the Scottish electorate, plus a mandate to seek a second independence referendum.

Read more:

• David Davis may have buried Scottish independence once and for all
• Sturgeon did not breach ministerial code over Alex Salmond controversy, independent inquiry finds

That, though, is not quite the end of the matter. For Ms Sturgeon now finds herself in the position of the eccentric man in the old joke who tells worried onlookers: “Don’t worry about me. I’m not mad, and I’ve got a certificate to prove it.”

Mud sticks, in other words, and the last few weeks have hardly been edifying. The first minister’s enemies in her own party, Mr Salmond being the most prominent, are unlikely to pipe down for long. To a degree, the Salmond affair and its dizzyingly byzantine procedural wranglings over points of law has been a proxy for more traditional political differences: Ms Sturgeon’s style of leadership and her general attitude to her predecessor and his future role (being none); the best tactics in the quest for a second referendum on independence; and the issue of trans rights, where divisions in the SNP on identity politics mirror those in wider society.

As far as can be judged, Ms Sturgeon’s internal critics believe she should bypass the formal legal procedure for securing an independence referendum, which involves winning (the unlikely) agreement from Boris Johnson to hold one. They also think she is mistaken about gender recognition, and dislike her “closed” style – her husband is chief executive of the SNP, for example. Recently, a number of her critics have been elected to the National Executive Committee of the SNP, the workings of which have been compared by one participant to “a zoo”. Ms Sturgeon’s greatest asset is that she has no serious competition for the job of party leader and first minister, and dominates her party even more than Mr Salmond used to. Even if they wanted to ditch her, there are few alternatives to Ms Sturgeon within the SNPs squabbling ranks. That, though, hasn’t quelled the grumbling.

Sturgeon pictured leaving her Glasgow home on Monday morning (PA)

The SNP’s divisions seem to be more about personalities than politics, but that merely makes them even more vicious and intractable. Ms Sturgeon will surely find such internal arguments a tiresome distraction, though the public seem little interested in them, just as they were mostly unmoved by the Salmond affair. Brexit, Covid and education have been more pressing problems for most people – though neither are they on the whole clamouring for another immediate vote on nationhood. If nothing else, the momentum behind a second referendum seems to have been lost.

Things need to be kept in perspective. She is still the dominant personality in Scotland, and has acquired herself well during the pandemic (albeit with stats scarcely different to the rest of the UK). Apart from the as yet untested new leader of Scottish Labour, Ms Sturgeon has little to worry about from the main opposition parties in Scotland, who neatly split the unionist vote between them. There is no doubt Ms Sturgeon will emerge as first minister and represent the largest party in the Scottish parliament next time.

However, that is not enough. Ms Sturgeon is setting the bar high for herself. She needs to extend her party’s lead and return with a thumping mandate to maximise her moral authority to demand another vote on independence inside a decade. Yet a commanding majority in the Scottish parliament is far from a foregone conclusion, so there is a certainly a danger that she will not secure that. The last few months of bitter internecine warfare between the current first minister and party leader and the former first minister and party leader might have only engrossed those inside political circles, but it certainly did the SNP few favours with the voters.

Ms Sturgeon herself admits grievous mistakes in the way she handled the complaints about Mr Salmond, and it was not exactly a masterclass in good governance. More even than that, Ms Sturgeon and her party, post-Brexit, have new and even more difficult questions to answer about how the border with England would operate for an independent Scottish state inside the EU customs union and single market. Experience with Northern Ireland suggests that there is no happy solution to the “hard border” problem. In the comings months and years, Ms Sturgeon will find such questions much harder than anything thrown at her about Mr Salmond in recent weeks. With a convincing victory in an independence referendum looking dicey, it would be quite understandable if she started to dial down the rhetoric about imminent independence.