SNP leadership race: Rishi Sunak's high tax Tories and Labour's surge in polls will make it tough for Nicola Sturgeon's successor – John McLellan

I don’t know if Nicola Sturgeon and Noele Gordon had much in common, but both were queens of their respective empires, and both found themselves at crossroads, in the latter’s case as the matriarch Meg Richardson the famous TV soap motel of that name.

One was sacked after 18 years at the heart of the show and the other has walked away after 16 years at the top of government, and just as Ms Gordon’s unceremonious dumping in 1981 renewed public interest in its wobbly sets and even wobblier plot-lines ─ now featured in Nolly, a new ITV mini-series ─ the spotlight is not only on the next episode of the long-running SNP leadership psycho-drama but a political legacy more shaky than a Crossroads backdrop.

There is none shakier than what was supposed to be Ms Sturgeon’s priority of closing the education attainment gap, cited in last week’s resignation speech and blatantly twisted into a spurious claim of success on the basis that access to higher education had been widened for people from deprived backgrounds. It’s true the Scottish Funding Council reported that the 16.7 per cent of Scottish students starting their first degree courses in 2020-21 from the 20 per cent most deprived areas was a record, but that’s not the same thing, and not if it’s achieved by manipulation which forces more affluent students to go elsewhere.

A more accurate assessment is contained in a new study from a team of Stirling University academics, including Professor Mark Priestley, a member of the Scottish Government’s Curriculum and Assessment Board. It found courses being cut, a decline in social subjects, arts and languages, which disproportionately affected students from disadvantaged areas, and those students more likely to be held back, sitting Highers in S6 not S5, for example.

Actress Noele Gordon, aka Meg Mortimer, with her screen daughter and husband, ruled the roost in soap opera Crossroads until, like Nicola Sturgeon, she found her time in charge hit a dead end (Picture: PA)

It identified “the existence of practices which are counter-educational… to benefit school attainment statistics” and that many senior figures in the system, including council education directors, “dislike current practices associated with the attainment agenda”. As if that wasn’t damning enough, the study found narrowing the S4 curriculum was linked to fewer qualifications in general, helped explain poorer results in the international Pisa tests (from which the Scottish Government has now withdrawn) and, worst of all, there was “an association between a narrower curriculum in S4 and less positive destinations after leaving school”.

Along with NHS Scotland, drug deaths, a flagging economy and a crumbling transport system, sorting out this mess must be a priority for her successor, with Kate Forbes the marginal bookies’ favourite at 11-10. With Humza Yousaf at 5-4, it’s too close to call as internal factions fight it out in ways most SNP members have never experienced; the last contest was 2004 when there were around 10,000 members compared to 104,000 at the end of 2021, so the vast majority have never had to think about leadership before.

Although a narrow Scottish election victory was only three years away, the SNP was not in government and support for independence was in the mid-20s so there was far less at stake. But even when Roseanna Cunningham was on course to beat Nicola Sturgeon in 2004, it was more about personality than direction, and it became a non-event when Alex Salmond spotted the danger of a potential leader whose charisma was less than obvious and took Ms Sturgeon’s place.

Perhaps 2004 was a sign that Ms Sturgeon could walk away to avoid defeat and preserve her reputation, which now rests on a string of election victories and, as I wrote here last week, on the redirection of income to child benefits and other welfare payments which future administrations will find politically impossible to unpick. In last week’s resignation speech, she cited child benefits as her main achievement before talking nonsense about the attainment gap and the supposed majority support for independence. Poll after poll shows the opposite, and from the “buyers’ remorse” surge immediately after the 2014 referendum and the Nationalist tsunami in the 2015 general election, now she finds that the future, as baseball’s master of mangled maxims Yogi Berra might have put it, ain’t what it used to be.

The new leader might be able to keep the party in power in 2026, but with only a two-point lead over Labour in Westminster polling that’s by no means guaranteed in a proportionate system, and to put it mildly, Mr Yousaf and Ms Forbes have yet to display the presence or presentation of a Salmond or Sturgeon. The truth is the game is up.

A sustainable and growing majority for independence would now be out of sight if the SNP’s 2015 position had been maintained and younger independence-supporting voters replaced older unionists going to meet the great imperialists in the sky. But they don’t and, as this column has pointed out before, something happens to young idealists, as it always has done since St Paul told the Corinthians how he put away childish things, when vague promises on the never-never eventually meet the harsh truth of real life.

A combination of circumstances has kept independence support as high as it is, including the unattractiveness of Labour’s Miliband-Corbyn era, Brexit, Boris, and the force of Ms Sturgeon’s personality (as opposed to her actions) through the pandemic. But in driving through the de facto referendum approach to the next general election, her personality was also the route to self-destruction. And when Ms Sturgeon even had what looked like a genuine smile when she met Rishi Sunak ─ who put up taxes to pay for the NHS and social care ─ the SNP can’t fully rely on a Conservative bogeyman to keep the bile ducts full.

Now the rebalancing of the relationship with Europe is in sight, Labour is making itself electable, the political tide is turning. On even a cursory examination of Ms Sturgeon’s record, it’s not hard to conclude she was not so much at a crossroads but a dead end.