STURGEON: I’VE MADE MISTAKES

Stark admission on her last day as First Minister at Holyrood

NICOLA Sturgeon admitted during her final farewell yesterday at Holyrood: ‘I’ve made mistakes.’

The departing First Minister insisted that she was proud of her record in government, despite a series of broken promises and disastrous policies.

Ms Sturgeon also issued a plea for unity within the warring SNP as it tries to replace her in a contest riven by infighting.

But she was accused of prioritising ‘vanity projects’ in her eight-year reign at the top of the SNP, as Labour demanded an early election following the result of the contest to find her successor on Monday.

During fiery final exchanges at First Minister’s Questions, Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross said the party she had built with her husband Peter Murrell and predecessor alex Salmond is now ‘collapsing’.

In a tearful personal statement to MSPs, Ms Sturgeon admitted making mistakes in her time as First Minister – and said there are things she could have done better. She did

not directly mention Mr Murrell, who failed to make an appearance to watch his wife’s personal statement.

Opposition leaders said it was proof he had become ‘toxic’ following his resignation as SNP chief executive for misleading the public and media over party membership numbers.

Mr Ross said the SNP ‘lied to the Press and they lied to the public’ about the issue, and accused Ms Sturgeon of ‘treating the public like idiots’. He added: ‘The First Minister’s farewell tour this week has been a masterclass in deceit and political spin.

‘She was far too busy to appear in front of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee, but somehow – somehow – managed to eke out time in her schedule to sit down on Loose Women to debate the great offices of state and the matters of state with Janet Street-Porter.

‘She said her party is experiencing “growing pains”. This must be the first time that growing pains have actually shrunk something.

‘She claims that she has left her successor a “brilliant foundation”. First Minister, that is all that is left: the foundation of the house that Sturgeon, Salmond and Murrell... built is collapsing.’

Last week, it was revealed that the SNP had lost 30,000 members in just over a year – even though the party previously claimed the figures were inaccurate.

Ms Sturgeon, who criticised Mr Ross for missing a veterans’ event to referee a football match in 2020, said: ‘I am proud of the record of the Government I have led through some of the toughest times that Scotland has faced in recent history. But ultimately the only people who will cast a verdict on the record of my or future governments are the people of Scotland.

‘In my time as First Minister, they have had eight opportunities to do that. On each of those eight opportunities, they have voted for me, for the SNP and for my Government. That is a record that I am very proud to stand on.’

But she said later in her final statement to MSPs: ‘I have made my fair share of mistakes in the last eight years and, of course, there are things I wish I had done better or differently. But overall and over

whelmingly, I am proud of what has been achieved.’

Mr Ross said: ‘On Nicola Sturgeon’s watch, Scotland’s schools have plummeted down international league tables. She has made no progress on the attainment gap and broke her promise to close it completely.

‘The Named Person Act, the Hate Crime Act and the Gender Recognition Bill were all unworkable. Drug deaths in Scotland are the highest in Europe, five times greater than anywhere else in the United Kingdom. Right now one in seven Scots is on an NHS waiting list. And on her final day in this chamber as First Minister, a cross-party committee of this parliament delivered a damning report on ferries. They found that she personally intervened to prioritise vanity over vessels, leading to huge delays and costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds. Nicola Sturgeon ignored Scotland’s priorities in favour of her obsession with independence.

‘She divided our country and failed on every mission she set herself.’

AS Scotland’s longest-serving First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon has ruled her party with an iron first for nearly a decade – until it descended into bloody civil war.

Yesterday she faced her last grilling at the Scottish parliament with a tearful farewell that was high on drama but decidedly low on substance.

Her sycophantic acolytes were delighted by the display – one MSP noted that some Nationalists had brought boxes of tissues with them, anticipating an emotional session.

The reality is that, predictably, it was a fractious affair full of angry recriminations and baseless boasts. Yet for all the histrionics, what precisely has Ms Sturgeon achieved since being appointed to the top job in November 2014?

She took over in the aftermath of the SNP’s independence referendum defeat but notched up a series of election victories which owed more to the paucity of opposition than her party’s own lamentable track record.

But she failed to shift the dial on the only cause Ms Sturgeon and her colleagues truly care about – tearing Scotland out of the UK – and now their independence dream lies in tatters after a string of strategic disasters.

Disaffection among the grassroots was reflected in a devastating slump in membership – fuelled by the chaos of transgender reform – which the SNP, once the masters of the dark arts of spin, attempted unsuccessfully to cover up.

Her premiership has been a calamitous era for Scotland, during which toxic tribalism was whipped up in an abortive bid to advance the separatist cause, while public services languished in a state of terminal decline.

Ms Sturgeon reeled off a litany of alleged successes, backed up by SNP social media posts, which included the baby box scheme and the botched nationalisation of ScotRail.

Her defining mission was to close the pupil attainment gap, ending the lottery of state education, which has been effectively ditched after failing to make significant headway – an appalling betrayal of the children from deprived households she had vowed to help.

Ms Sturgeon’s progressive credentials have been exposed as a sham – and figures yesterday showed ‘persistent poverty is gradually increasing’. Tax hikes were presented as an achievement of her regime, despite turning low-growth Scotland into the highest-taxed part of the UK.

And Ms Sturgeon’s claim to have stood up for the ‘founding principles’ of the NHS was undermined by the disclosure of secret talks last year about the creation of a twotiered health service where the better-off would pay for their treatment.

Police officer numbers are at their lowest level for 15 years and the cash-starved single force – set up by the SNP a decade ago – admits that funding falls short of the sum required for a 21st-century service, as the number of reported rapes soar and fewer than half of all crimes are solved.

Doubtless a new career lies ahead for Ms Sturgeon, and indeed for her husband Peter Murrell, who quit as SNP chief executive amid the row over membership numbers, in the midst of a police probe into £600,000 allegedly missing from the party’s coffers.

After-dinner speeches and appearances on TV chat shows may prove irresistible for the endlessly self-promoting former First Minister in the years to come – after she passes the baton to a successor who will inevitably continue the SNP’s reckless obsession with breaking up Britain.

While Ms Sturgeon relishes the prospect of new opportunities, Scotland can only look forward to more of the same failure and division which have characterised her time in office.