Nicola Sturgeon has already outlasted two British prime ministers since coming to power in 2014, and she is looking forward to seeing off the third.
“I disagreed with David Cameron, I disagreed with Theresa May, I disagreed with Boris Johnson, but he’s the only one who’s actually disgraced the office of prime minister,” she said at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. “The sooner he’s gone, the better.”
Johnson’s disregard for detail had made her “look back fondly” on the May era, she said. At least May “always knew her stuff”.
In that respect, at least, perhaps Sturgeon saw something of herself. In her eight years as Scotland’s first minister, she has displayed a similar command of her brief, coupled with an electoral gift that has eluded recent residents of No. 10.
“You have to admire her political skill,” said The Scotsman in 2015. In the years that have followed, her allies – and opponents – have found little reason to disagree.
Who is Nicola Sturgeon?
Born in Irvine, Ayrshire, in 1970 and educated at the nearby Dreghorn primary school and Greenwood Academy, Nicola Sturgeon went on to graduate from the University of Glasgow with a law degree.
Her parents were working-class – her father was an electrician and her mother a dental nurse. The family wasn’t political, Sturgeon told The Guardian in 2015, and she was an unremarkable child. “There was nothing in my childhood that said, ‘She’s going to be first minister of the country one day.’” Indeed, when she was younger, Nicola Sturgeon had considered becoming a children’s author.
Nevertheless, her commitment to Scottish independence runs deep, earning her the title of “the most dangerous woman in Britain”, according to the Daily Mail. She joined the Scottish National Party (SNP) at the age of 16 and has been campaigning ever since for Scotland to end its more than 300-year union with the rest of Britain.
Sturgeon currently lives in Glasgow with her husband Peter Murrell.
Nicola Sturgeon’s parliamentary career
Sturgeon has been a Member of the Scottish Parliament since 1999 and now represents Glasgow Southside.
In government, she served as cabinet secretary for health and wellbeing between 2007 and 2012, then cabinet secretary for infrastructure, capital investment and cities until 2014. Throughout this time she also served as deputy first minister.
She took over as SNP leader in November 2014 and was sworn in as first minister soon after. Her predecessor, Alex Salmond, had quit after the independence referendum two months previously, in which Scots voted to stay in the UK by 55.3% to 44.7%.
Sturgeon and Salmond had worked closely together at the heart of the first SNP administration at Holyrood, but their relationship has since soured. The Scottish Government’s “botched handling” of harassment complaints against the former first minister triggered their falling out, The Herald said.
Seeking to reverse the 2014 defeat, Sturgeon recently announced plans for a second referendum in 2023, using the same question that was put to voters eight years ago: “Should Scotland be an independent country?”
The plan sets Sturgeon “on a collision course” with Downing Street, said Politico. She is now asking the UK supreme court to rule on the legality of holding a new referendum on Scottish independence without Westminster’s permission.
Already Scotland’s longest-serving first minister, Sturgeon has said she plans to leave politics on her own terms rather than trying to cling to office like Tony Blair or Boris Johnson. “I am not about to quit the stage,” she told The Guardian recently. “But I look forward to the opportunity to do other interesting things after politics.”
Even those who look forward to her exit may wonder what will come next. “She has been the face of Scottish politics for so many years that it is hard to think about what it must have looked like before she arrived on the scene,” said Vogue.
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