The fish rots from the head in Sturgeon’s Scotland

Nicola Sturgeon is going nowhere. Some of her more excitable critics reckon the complete implosion of her policy on transgender prisoners could finish off her premiership. Not least since it comes just as she was planning a fightback against the UK government’s decision to block her Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill. The SNP leader has been subjected to cringe-making TV interviews about whether she thinks rapists are women if they say so and awkward questions at Holyrood about placing male sex offenders in women’s prisons. She has been forced to U-turn repeatedly and has rushed out new regulations on transgender prisoners at odds with the self-identification principle at the heart of her GRR Bill. 

But the events of the past seven days should not be assumed to doom Sturgeon’s leadership. Yes, she been proved comprehensively wrong in policy, strategy, and political instinct. She has shown herself to be a gullible fool taken in by crank gender ideology that has collided roughly with reality.