Like her argument for independence, Sturgeon’s exit was evasion shrouded in candour

Over the last few weeks, Nicola Sturgeon has been getting more and more tired. When she gets up in the morning, she’s been finding it harder and harder to tell herself that she can just keep going and going and going.

And so, she said, she decided to summon the media to Bute House, with an hour’s notice, to announce her resignation. She didn’t manage to elucidate exactly why it is that after eight-and-a-bit years as first minister of Scotland, and another seven as deputy first minister before that, all this job-based fatigue is only creeping up on her now.

But her decision was, she said, “not a reaction to short-term pressures”. It was personal, not political. It was nothing to do, for example, with the blocking of her Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which had led to a huge slump in support for her personally, for her government, and for the cause of independence.

Nor did it have anything to do with the Supreme Court’s verdict that Scotland could not unilaterally hold an independence referendum without Westminster’s say-so, and the hammer blow that dealt to the cause of Scottish independence.

Nor was it related to a police inquiry into alleged fraud involving the SNP, or a £100,000 loan made to the party by its own chief executive, Peter Mundell, to whom she is married (though she did expressly refuse to answer a question on this topic).

These, she explained, were just the vexations of the hour, the minutiae of politics, and absolutely nothing to do with the sudden realisation that she’d just had enough.

And it’s possible she’s right. In football, or in rugby, it is always the case that losing is more exhausting than winning. That the team chasing the ball, putting in the tackles, gets worn out a lot faster. More effort is required, for precious little reward. And it is just as debilitating mentally as it is physically.

Soon, she said, the SNP will have to hold a conference, at which she would have had to urge her party to adopt her position that the next Holyrood election should be a de facto referendum on independence. She found that she couldn’t bring herself to do that, knowing that she might not have the strength to still be there come election time.

And maybe, you never know, she found the prospect of upholding that position for an extended period of time quite tiring, too, on account of its being completely absurd.

A vote in an election is a vote for who you want to represent you, and that’s it. Politicians, generally speaking, don’t get to dictate to voters what their votes really mean. And this is never more true than when the courts have just decided that they can’t.

So Sturgeon probably was, and is, very tired indeed – but with very good reason. Tired and fed up. Fed up, specifically, because the game is up.

Of course she was a towering figure in British politics for a very long time. She was admired all over the UK, even by people who held no sympathy for her cause whatsoever. It helped that she was a class act, at a time when there was so little class around.

Scotland’s Covid policies, and Covid outcomes, were very close to identical to those in England and Wales, yet her popularity soared throughout the pandemic, while Boris Johnson’s collapsed. Why? Because she provided the tone, the empathy, the openness and honesty – in short, the leadership that came naturally to her, and was entirely alien to him.

The wider United Kingdom is certainly guilty of failing to engage with what the SNP gets up to beyond success and failure in its defining cause. It was intriguing that, as she announced her departure, there were as many questions about the state of Scotland as there were about the state of the fight for independence, if not more.

The NHS in Scotland is in no better state than it is elsewhere. There is a huge and ongoing scandal around contracts for ferry routes to various Scottish islands, which has already cost the taxpayer an estimated £500m.

On many occasions, Sturgeon has spoken passionately about her ambition to close the “attainment gap” between wealthy Scottish children and less well-off ones. She was asked if she regretted the fact that she has achieved, in eight years, almost nothing on that front. She answered by wondering aloud whether the journalist who asked it had any regrets in his life, which was pretty ropey stuff.

But nevertheless, she gave honest answers to questions, and she was also incredibly blessed with that most precious of skills for a politician: of leaving the impression that she had answered a question when she most certainly hadn’t. And her resignation speech was a masterclass in that; in evasion shrouded in self-deprecating candour.

Not that you can blame her too much. She knows that someone will have to follow her, and she knows, probably, that whoever that might be will not be in her league. Actual candour about the challenges ahead is the very last thing they need. If she had actually offered that, she might have found herself forced to carry on; after all, who would want to replace her?