Nicola Sturgeon is a hard act to follow

Nicola Sturgeon insisted last month she had ‘plenty in the tank’, but apparently the First Minister was already running on empty. Announcing her resignation this morning, Sturgeon said she finally decided to step down only yesterday at the funeral of a long-serving SNP activist. However she also made clear she had begun to realise over the past year she no longer had the energy to give ‘100 per cent’ to the job.

In an emotional press conference at Bute House in Edinburgh, Sturgeon insisted she could have ‘led the party to independence’. But she conceded that her personality was becoming a liability: ‘Fixed opinions about me are becoming a barrier to reasoned debate,’ she said. It was time to hand over the reins to someone, she implied, with a lesser personality.

Sturgeon appealed for politics to become ‘less polarised’ and more consensual. However, she didn’t appear to accept that her own policies might have contributed to that polarisation.