Sturgeon tossed aside

Out of the blue, Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister, announced her resignation.

It’s hard to pinpoint the reasons for it. That’s not because no reasons are obvious, but because there are too many of them.

She herself cited the mounting pressures of work and her increasingly irresistible urge to spend more time with her nephews and nieces. “I’m a human being,” she explained, a declaration met with incredulity by her fans and detractors alike.

For the former, she existed in the ultra, demiurgic range above mere humans. For the latter, she inhabited the infra range underneath Homo sapiens (she certainly isn’t sapient). Yet members of either group or none saw right through the reasons she cited.

I’ll mention a few real ones later, SNP’s defeat in the independence referendum in particular, but I’d suggest that the most important one is cultural dissonance between Sturgeon and the people. Oh sure, they’ve voted for her SNP in overwhelming numbers, effectively turning Scotland into a single party state.

But that was their way of cocking a snook at the English. The very name of the Scottish National Party rings so many bells, awakening the spirits of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, if only as portrayed by Mel Gibson and Angus McFadyen respectively.

(Contrary to a popular misapprehension, the Scots don’t wish to see an essential part of Catholic liturgy renamed Angus Dei.)

The words ‘Scottish’ and ‘National’ resound through their hearts, but that’s more than can be said for Sturgeon’s attempts to turn Scotland into the wokiest country in Europe.

The Scots are a hardy lot who don’t throw cute frisbees in manicured parks. Their national sport is caber toss, throwing wooden poles weighing upwards of 150 pounds.

Such raw masculinity (in both men and women, who do caber toss too) is at odds with having transgender rights thrust down their throats. Haggis and deep-fried Mars bars, yes. Whisky, definitely. Sturgeon’s inhuman Gender Recognition Reform Bill – not in my mouth you don’t.

That wasn’t the first fiasco of Sturgeon’s eight-year reign, but it contained that last straw that broke the back of her tenure with a deafening crack. And the name of the straw was Adam Graham, about whom I wrote the other day.

That thug brutally raped two women and, when arrested, declared he now identified as a woman himself. As a result, he was put into a women’s prison, and Sturgeon obligingly referred to him as ‘her’.

The Scots can wear kilts, ideally with nothing underneath, but they wouldn’t wear that. An outburst of public indignation followed, and Sturgeon had to perform a volte-face. But the way she did so offended the Scots’ intelligence, which isn’t inconsiderable.

After all, it’s not only great cutthroats that Scotland has fed into the cultural stream of Europe, not only the cocktail Rob Roy named after one of them, but also great scientists, philosophers, writers and musicians – including the greatest living composer James MacMillan whose name will eventually be mentioned side by side with Bach’s.

Their logical faculty intact, they were dumbfounded when Sturgeon announced that thenceforth all rapists would be put into men’s prisons even if they identified as women. That made a mockery of her own bill.

Its essence is that a woman is a person identifying as such. That’s it. No legal or God forbid moral difference exists between that person and a woman endowed with the right set of chromosomes.

Fine. But if that’s the case, then how can such a newly dainty creature be sent to a men’s prison? Is she or isn’t she a woman? Does that mean that ‘she’ is actually a he?

Putting such questions to ideology-mongers like Sturgeon is both tactless and futile. Especially since the Scots felt the right answer in their bone marrow: she wasn’t up to the job.

That, as I said, was the last straw, but Sturgeon’s back was already half-broken by the referendum caber the Scots had tossed at the SNP in 2014. She was Salmond’s second-in-command then, and became the leader immediately thereafter. But her time was borrowed.

Sturgeon’s lifelong passion is the reversal of the 1707 Acts of Union that created the United Kingdom. The two crowns had already been united since 1603, with the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne as James I.

In theory, the Scots like the idea of independence – they profess hatred for the English, even though I’ve never met a single Scotsman who genuinely feels that way. But then they put their celebrated pragmatism to work and realise that they’d rather not become an impoverished province of the EU.

After all, the British parliament sends £41 billion a year to Scotland as much-needed subsidies. The Scots correctly feel that the EU wouldn’t be so generous. So, when the question of independence was put to them in 2014, 55 per cent voted against.

Since then Sturgeon has been campaigning for a second referendum with the passion of a maniac. I suppose she had absorbed the culture of the EU she loves so much. There, if people vote the wrong way, as they did in Ireland, Norway and Denmark, they are made to vote again and again until they get it right.

But in the UK things are different, a fact communicated last November by the Supreme Court that voted unanimously that no second referendum was on the cards, not without Westminster’s approval at any rate.

Sturgeon was incandescent. “Scottish democracy will not be denied,” she screamed, which was rich coming from a woman who had spent every minute of her tenure stamping out any dissenting views within her party.

She then tried to do her utmost to eliminate the anti-independence lead in the polls or at least to narrow it, but, if anything, it has widened. Neither her wokery nor her burning affection for the EU hit the right notes with the Scots. Instead they sounded alarm bells.

Then there was the minor matter of the £600 million that had gone missing from the party funds. The Scots abhor even a hint of fiscal impropriety, especially when it’s not their own.

Experienced political mechanic that she is, Sturgeon knew her time was up. So she wisely chose to bow out before being tossed out on her ear. I wish her every failure in private life.