The new leader of the Scottish National party, Nicola Sturgeon, has inherited the strongest political position that any new party leader could possibly hope for. The SNP is in government in Holyrood, rides high in the opinion polls, has more than trebled its membership, hopes to win at the very least a clutch of new seats in May’s UK election and looks well set to be re-elected as a majority government in Scotland in 2016. All that is required of Ms Sturgeon, some might assume, is that she doesn’t drop the ball that the departing Alex Salmond has placed in her hands.
The new SNP leader takes office with many great advantages. She has been chosen unopposed because, with the exception of Mr Salmond, she is clearly the pre-eminent politician of her party. She has also served her apprenticeship for power well, as a loyal, skilful and popular deputy leader for the past 10 years and as deputy first minister for the past seven. Ms Sturgeon’s west-of-Scotland background, her left-of-centre outlook, and her appeal to Glaswegian voters, some of whom she represents in Holyrood, also fits her ideally for an SNP whose primary political task in the months ahead is to nail down the support of the former Labour voters who embraced the yes campaign in September.
Replacing a leader who has dominated the party for so long, however, has its difficulties as well as its opportunities. Mr Salmond has been SNP leader for 20 of the past 24 years. He has taken the party to pre-eminence in Scotland and to the threshold of independence. He remains, as he made clear in his farewell speech in Perth on Friday, both a big figure and a player. He is the nearest thing Scotland has to a celebrity politician. He is, as Ms Sturgeon herself acknowledged, the hardest of hard acts to follow.
Ms Sturgeon is a very different kind of politician from her predecessor. She is less of a populist, less folksy, more of a political introvert and more on the left of politics. She is also a woman. Ms Sturgeon unquestionably knows her own mind, but she is likely to be a rather different kind of leader. That is a big opportunity, not least in terms of putting gender balance at the heart of her SNP. Her party needs time to adjust to her style. She is likely to make more speeches about Scottish education and fewer about Scotland’s oil. But with big elections due in six and 18 months respectively, time is something she doesn’t have a lot of.
The biggest single question facing Ms Sturgeon and her new government will be how to play the independence question. The mood in the Perth conference reflects the current mood across much of civic Scotland, as reflected in the opinion polls. More Scots seem up for independence today than in the long campaign that ended in September. Many in the SNP feel emboldened to want another referendum after 2016. The anti-UK mood, embodied in Mr Salmond’s speechon Friday, is hot. But Ms Sturgeon needs to stay cool and avoid rushing into such commitments. To lose one independence referendum may be excusable. To lose a second could quickly leave the SNP with nowhere much to go.
