Nicola Sturgeon may have contemplated long about hers, but the one she delivered last week I suspect was written in haste. It appeared to me, at least, as more of a job application for a position in history with a bogus CV.

I will admit I could be accused of being a little jaundiced. I know that Nicola Sturgeon despises me, my colleagues, and everyone else who is in, votes for, or even supports or nods towards the Conservative party. We know this because she told the world as much just a few months ago. So, when our outgoing First Minister calls for political dialogue to be less brutal, forgive me for quoting back at her one of her favourite lines: I will take no lessons from her.

Remember the election campaign when, in a BBC debate, a nurse told Ms Sturgeon of her need to use foodbanks? She was then derided by Ms Sturgeon’s team, by Jeane Freeman and Joanna Cherry as being a ‘Tory plant’ apparently married to a Tory councillor. None of that was true. She was just a nurse struggling to feed her family. But somehow the newspapers were made aware of photographs of her enjoying a meal on holiday – such a crime.

No, when Ms Sturgeon complains of the treatment of women in politics, I think of that broad grin, and her pumping her fists as she discovered Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson had lost her seat in East Dunbartonshire. Or think back just a few weeks ago about how she derided her colleague Ash Regan, for resigning in protest at the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, to defend women’s rights. Or her characterising of some opponents of gender reform – many of them women – as transphobes, homophobes and racists.

For me, little of Ms Sturgeon’s speech rang true. What she claimed as a record of achievement crumbles on inspection. Scotland a fairer, more progressive place? She raised taxes, yes, but overall revenues are well down on what they would have been under the old, pre-devolution system, leaving less money to distribute. She handed back welfare powers rather than use them. She demanded more powers and by doing so created a blackhole in Scotland’s finances. She gave us cuts and destroyed local democracy.

She brought in minimum pricing of alcohol, but there is little sign that alcohol abuse has decreased. We are the drug-deaths capital of Europe by some margin because, in her words, she took her “eye off the ball”.

The litany of failings could fill not just this column but a supplement in her dishonour. Her greatest failure may be not in what she did but that, with so much power, she didn’t even attempt to do much good in government at all.

SNP supporters were hoodwinked by Nicola Sturgeon over the chances of a referendum and independence (Picture: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

There is a smell about her leadership that will linger long after the garlands and wreaths have faded. Let us remember that her predecessor, Alex Salmond, accused people around her of abusing the powers of the state to try to wrongly imprison him. That, in the Scottish Parliament’s inquiry into the whole affair, she was found to have misled Parliament. That the inappropriate behaviour Mr Salmond was accused of was conduct that his closest colleague, Nicola Sturgeon, apparently never noticed in all her years at his side.

Her gift is that everything she says sounds convincing. She appears a conviction politician in thought and deed. Until you sow the moments into minutes, into hours, days and years. The statements that shone in the moment do not make up a coherent narrative. They do not tell a story of national purpose but rather a squalid tale of a self-serving career.

Her resignation comes days after she refused to say when she knew that her husband, the chief executive of the SNP, lent more than £100,000 to the party she leads. On the day she resigned, she refused to comment on the police investigation into the allegedly fraudulent use of more than £600,000 of party funds. Like Salmond’s inappropriate behaviour, there is so much she couldn’t recall yet, I believe, that is what she will be remembered for in time.

The truth is that she ran out of road. Sturgeon’s raison d’etre was to create division. She tried to do that again within the UK with the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, but found out that she did not speak for Scotland.

I was astonished to hear the BBC Scotland political presenter Martin Geissler claim at the weekend that she had defied the saying that all political careers end in failure. It was hardly a balanced view. This is a politician whose entire career was devoted to one cause – breaking up the UK – and after eight years in office that goal is no closer than it was when she started.

An honest analysis of the situation always suggested that her time was up, as was aired in these columns just a few weeks ago. But whoever takes over is left with the same problem that she hoodwinked her party through for her entire leadership. How do you convince the SNP membership that a referendum and independence are just around the corner when the country doesn’t want either and you have no chance of delivering them?

The best thing the new SNP leader could do is to imagine their resignation speech and focus on three practical things to improve Scots’ lives that they can boast about when they deliver it. And take a leaf out of Nicola’s book and leave delivering a referendum to their successor – and to theirs after them.

Murdo Fraser is a Scottish Conservative MSP for Mid-Scotland and Fife

Nicola Sturgeon’s legacy is ultimately one of failure, on independence and governing Scotland – Murdo Fraser

Comments