A new dawn has broken, has it not? Nicola Sturgeon may not have actually stepped down yet – that will follow the selection of her successor, which promises to be a fascinating process – but the post-Sturgeon era has nonetheless begun.
This means that Conservatives are having to grapple with the first challenge it presents: how to talk about the outgoing First Minister?
As I noted elsewhere yesterday, there is in some quarters a noble reflex to strike a sort of Christmas truce. Ruth Davidson tweeted:
“Politics for another day. Stepping down from an all-consuming role is hard and decompression takes time. @NicolaSturgeon has done one helluva shift. I wish her well for the future.”
It isn’t difficult to understand why the former Scottish Conservative leader, who decided to step down at a time of her own choosing despite still being a major asset to her party, would empathise with the First Minister, who in her speech yesterday took pains to stress the personal dimension behind her own resignation:
“Now, to be clear, I’m not expecting violins here, but I am a human being as well as a politician. When I entered government in 2007, my niece and youngest nephew were babies just months old. As I step down, they are about to celebrate their 17th birthdays.”
It is absolutely right not to engage in personal invective about a political opponent, although that is universally the case. It’s both the morally-right thing to do and, very often, better politics too.
As Shakespeare put it in Henry V: “When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.” One of the First Minister’s great political gifts is for being liked.
This has been hindered somewhat, as she acknowledged yesterday, by the deeply polarised state of Scottish politics. But one need only look at the fawning coverage she gets from many southern commentators, most of whom display no awareness of the Scottish Government’s abysmal record on health, schools, transport and much else, to see what a gift it is.
There is therefore some danger in Davidson’s dictum. “Politics for another day” might be fine if it really is just for a day. But it would be a big mistake to extend the principle to the next few days and weeks as the First Minister conducts her farewell tour. As I explained elsewhere yesterday:
“It is ill-mannered to speak ill of the dead, who cannot reply. But the First Minister will still be with us for many years yet. Indeed, in her speech she took pains to stress that resigning the highest office does not mean that she is quitting the struggle, even if it might no longer occupy her every waking hour.”
If there is another referendum campaign within the next decade, perhaps longer, Sturgeon will be part of the separatist campaign, “still possessed of her first-rate powers as a communicator and freed from her shortcomings as a governor”.
How effective she could be will depend to a great extent on how her rule as First Minister is remembered, and the first drafts of that history are being written now. A triumphant swansong will stick in the public imagination far longer than any volume of detailed criticism once the waters of time have closed over her somewhat and she is no longer in the headlines.
So the Conservatives, and indeed her pro-Union opponents in all parties, should not be shy about pressing the case for the prosecution against the myth, the meme, of Sturgeon the great progressive.
And if they’re ever tempted to deem this unseemly, they should recall that whilst not all the vicious elements at the wilder fringe of the separatist movement can be pinned to the SNP, the First Minister chose to lead her Westminster MPs Ian Blackford, whose campaign against Charles Kennedy in 2015 was a genuine disgrace.