Being objective, if that’s possible, Nicola Sturgeon is an impressive figure.

It has often been said that she outclasses many of her contemporaries at Westminster, but she also outshines her predecessor. Alex Salmond, we can now see, was of his time, the sort of alpha male risk-taker of dubious character with which history is littered.

Sturgeon was his foil and a leader for a more earnest era. She has brought sober self-discipline, more explicit social justice goals and a punishing work ethic to the fore. The contrast is not just with Salmond but with that chancer Boris Johnson.

Remember those stratospheric pandemic approval ratings she had in 2020? Johnson, with typical bloody cheek, frames himself as a great pandemic leader, but our memories are better than that. He blustered, backtracked and U-turned his way through the lockdown period (and partied, we now know). How grateful the Scottish public were to have Sturgeon instead, with her constancy and nerdy command of detail.

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Key to her longevity has been her capacity to read and respond to the popular mood. Twenty years ago, she marched with local campaigners against the closure of local hospitals (part of an NHS reform package to centralise specialist care), which helped her and her party win power.

Able to pick her way through the trickiest political terrain, she has rarely in her long career been on the wrong side of public opinion.

But she’s stumbling now. She and her ministers seem unprepared for the controversy their Gender Recognition Reform Bill has stirred up. This is inexplicable, given the issues involved and the public concerns around it.

There are sound, compassionate reasons for trying to reform gender recognition law. Yet instead of sensing the political complexity and recognising the fragility of the balance that had to be struck, instead of taking a detached stance and adopting a respectful, reasoned tone that showed equal concern for women’s rights as trans rights, ministers from early on adopted zealous partisan arguments.

Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish Green Party minister Patrick Harvie, and other senior figures have repeatedly thrown around accusations of transphobia, without clear focus, allowing the mud to fall where it will.

Apart from the obvious injustice of this, since it has tended (surely deliberately) to taint and sideline those who criticise the bill whatever their motivation might actually be, it has been a public relations error Ms Sturgeon is struggling to recover from.

She may wish it were otherwise, but Scottish public opinion about the Gender Recognition Reform Bill is markedly more sceptical than opinion in Holyrood. For instance, two-thirds of people questioned in December oppose the bill’s provision to allow 16-year-olds to change gender while three-fifths oppose the abolition of the need for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

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She has stressed that her bill doesn’t change the system that decides which prison transgender prisoners are sent to, after a man convicted of raping two women who then changed gender, Isla Bryson, was initially taken to Cornton Vale women’s prison. Narrowly, what she says is true. But the reason Ms Sturgeon’s government has faced so many questions about Bryson and other transgender prisoners is that ministers are suspected of complacency about women’s safety.

And it’s hardly surprising. SNP and Green politicians have not always seemed to place much store by women’s concerns. Some have not behaved with due care in this debate.

It’s well known that nasty threats of violence have been meted out to women critics of gender reform, but somehow, in January, two SNP MPs and an MSP were photographed at a rally in front of banners calling for feminist critics of gender recognition reform to be “decapitated”. They were unaware the banners were there, but looked painfully complacent for not checking who they were consorting with. These are extraordinary and avoidable own goals.

The Herald:

Gender recognition reform is taking up a huge amount of Scottish Government bandwidth but that’s not all Ms Sturgeon is contending with. She and her government are also clocking up failures.

We hear this week that the number of homeless people in Scotland has reached its highest level since records began in 2002, with 28,944 people now in temporary accommodation, including more than 9,000 children.

Director of Shelter Scotland Alison Watson is withering in her criticism. She says the housing budget has been slashed “disproportionately” and it has been the Scottish Government’s “choice to deprioritise the fight against homelessness”.

“Over the years they have been presented with endless evidence and testimony that investing in social housing ends homelessness, tackles child poverty and is vital in tackling the housing emergency. We must be clear: the Scottish Government have made a choice not to act on that evidence.”

Drugs deaths. The attainment gap. Inadequate integration of health and social care. Ferries. There has been a lot of bad news lately that cannot simply be attributed to the pandemic. She has some big stuff to be proud of too, like the Scottish Child Payment, but the fails are mounting up.

This doesn’t mean Nicola Sturgeon is on her way out – the 50/50 constitutional faultline among Scottish voters, the SNP’s command of most pro-independence votes, and the lack of an obvious challenger within her own party, mean that she is still in a relatively strong position.

But none of this is likely to help build support for her party or, by extension, independence. Many former Labour and LibDem voters have lent the SNP their votes, not because they support independence, but because they dislike the Tories and admire Ms Sturgeon.

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The constitutional row now linked to the gender recognition bill, after the Scottish Secretary raised a Section 35 order, may allow the SNP to corral some of them, but with the constant swirl of controversy around her administration, there is an obvious danger of her losing support.

We must take a step back once again. No government can survive 16 years without having messes to sort out at the end. For all Nicola Sturgeon’s mishandling of the debate around gender recognition reform, she seems to have embarked upon it out of a genuine desire to improve the lives of marginalised transgender people. When her period in office becomes history instead of politics, the praise for her will be more fulsome.

But right now, her reputation is in trouble.