Things are so bad SNP should ask Sturgeon back as leader

It’s a monument to some great pharaoh, long-forgotten. Near the ruins a pedestal reads: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

What hubris. What a fall. Ozymandias, in his time the most powerful ruler on Earth, is now a “colossal wreck”.

The SNP hasn’t quite been swallowed by Saharan sands. But it’s certainly a poor imitation of its former self. Today, the party waits in humiliating stupor to see if it can pass its budget. It’s friendless in parliament, hostage to the mood of Green MSPs betrayed by Humza Yousaf.

Read more by Neil Mackay

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• SNP government now on a collision course with its own angry base

Its Midas touch is gone. Everything gets smeared with excrement rather than turning to gold. It stumbles from stupid scandal to stupid scandal, defending the indefensible whether that’s Michael Matheson running up enormous bills on the public purse or Stephen Flynn plotting against another SNP politician. It can’t even pass legislation. The phrase "zombie government" is too kind.

Party membership has plummeted so sharply half the jobs at SNP HQ are in jeopardy. So Happy Christmas, workers.

There’s a gaping black hole in SNP finances. At its 2019 height, there were 125,000 members. Today, there are 64,500. Reform claims to have nearly 100,000.

And, obviously, the SNP got well and truly gubbed by Labour at the General Election.

The greatest existential threat for the SNP is that its central aim - achieving independence - has never looked more distant or unobtainable. Indeed, the independence cause has been put back by the behaviour of the SNP itself. Internal feuds, scandals and the inability to govern better than a well-meaning gaggle of sixth formers, have left the Yes movement shipwrecked.

Now, compare that rotten state of affairs to the fortunes of the party when Nicola Sturgeon was in charge. Under Sturgeon, the nationalists never had it so good. That notion may resemble a cup of cold sick for most unionists and everyone on the right of the SNP, but facts are facts, no?

Just consider Sturgeon’s electoral performance. In 2016, Sturgeon secured just over two million constituency and regional votes at Holyrood. That had never been achieved. At the next election in 2021, she upped that tally to 2.3m votes.

There was much flapping of lips after the death of Alex Salmond that he was the greatest politician either the SNP or Scotland, for that matter, had ever known.

Well, not according to voting figures. In 2007, Salmond got 1.3m votes at Holyrood, rising to around 1.7m in 2011. On the numbers, Sturgeon wins.

The same is true at Westminster. In the 1992 and 1997 Westminster elections, Salmond took around 620,000 votes. In 2001, John Swinney - then leader - took 464,000. Salmond was back for 2005, taking 412,000; in 2010, Salmond took 491,000.

Then Sturgeon took over. At Westminster in 2015, she won 1.45 million votes; in 2017, 977,500; and in 2019, 1.2m.

Sturgeon resigned in February 2023. Come the General Election this year, Swinney as leader secured 724,700 votes, which significantly puts him far ahead of Salmond but still far behind Sturgeon.

Again, on the numbers alone, she’s miles in front.

Sturgeon made the careers of deadweight MPs who rode to Westminster on her coat-tails, then fell once she departed. John Nicolson serves as a good example. Elected in 2015, with Sturgeon at her unassailable heights, he got booted out in 2024. Nicolson was the apotheosis of pointless SNP politicians, a man for whom office seemed a vanity buff. His greatest contribution to politics was leaving it.

Even Sturgeon’s harshest critics, like Joanna Cherry, owe their fortunes to her - for good or ill. Like Nicolson, Cherry was elected in 2015, then was waved a hearty farewell by voters in 2024.

Today, the SNP is in a permanent defensive crouch, terrified of its own shadow and utterly unsure of its direction or purpose.

And the delicious political irony is this: Sturgeon, to a large extent, is also responsible for the mess the SNP is in. When she high-tailed it and resigned, she left the party facing a leadership crisis which horrified many supporters.

The party showed itself brutally split between social-conservatives and progressives, whom Sturgeon had held together. Many who’d voted SNP now pondered what the party actually stood for beyond independence.

Then came Operation Branchform, scandals, police inquiries and arrests. The party sank further.

In some strange co-dependent way, Sturgeon both made and broke the modern SNP. Here’s one curio for those outside the political bubble: there are many SNP members still loyal to Sturgeon, who wish that like some "queen over the water" she would return. Remember, she had an almost cult-like following among a certain type of nationalist.

Nicola Sturgeon signing her letter of resignation to the King on March 28, 2023 (Image: PA)

Sturgeon was able to attract as many as she repelled. She was, unquestionably, one of the most gifted political operators of her time. Does that mean she’s a wonderful person? No, it just means that in the sordid world of politics, there were few to match her.

This is "Schrödinger’s Sturgeon". She became both good and bad for the SNP at the same time.

Perhaps the SNP should ask her back. I say this only half-joking. Sturgeon probably has the sense to never seek a return to frontline politics - she’s an intelligent woman, after all.

But in this day and age - in the era of political madness - anything, even a Sturgeon comeback, is technically possible. Look, if a convicted felon like Donald Trump can get another spin at power, then so can any former Scottish First Minister.

And she’s certainly not leaving Holyrood. Just a few days ago Sturgeon made clear her intention to stand for the Scottish Parliament in 2026. If - when - Operation Branchform ever ends, who knows what Sturgeon might do, depending on how she emerges from it all, of course.

Neil Mackay is the Herald’s Writer at Large. He’s a multi-award-winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics