With the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland has lost one of its icons.
This fixture of female power lists was the antithesis of the macho old guard of Scotland’s previous incumbents.
On the global stage she represented the possibilities beyond a world contaminated by the sexist strongmen of populism.
And she was fearless in the face of them.
She appeared in the glossy pages of publications like Vogue, was recognised for her political prowess and became a stateswoman of international renown.
Scotland puffed its chest just that little more because of it.
She pushed against the Tory regime and its public school prime ministers, railing against their callousness, colonialist superiority and dismissal of Scotland as somehow lesser.
Sturgeon comes from Irvine in Ayrshire, an area decimated by Thatcherism, and so has witnessed close up hardship.
She recognised austerity was the demon, not the poor who suffered under it and Scots had a sense she was in their corner.
The poverty gap still gapes, but there is no doubting there was heart in Sturgeon’s fight against it.
Of course, now more than ever in the midst of the trans rights furore, she is not every feminist’s icon.
But whether she is proved right or wrong in that debate, it is fundamentally unfair of her critics to call her anti-feminist.
For young women raised on the superficiality of Insta and the Kardashians, Sturgeon had feminism trending again.
When those social media role models were promoting their handbag line, she was being admired for her substance, her smarts and social conscience.
For those of us, raised under the first female prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Sturgeon was the antidote to “that woman”. Unlike a Thatcher or a Liz Truss, she showed female politicians don’t need to emulate the worst traits of power-hungry men to succeed.
In her resignation speech she spoke of leaving through “duty and love” and nobody can question her devotion to Scotland.
She loves Scotland enough to let her control go, because she is not a Boris Johnson, whose narcissism will always prioritise power over country. And boy did she handle him and the other Tory PMs she saw off.
Of course, in right-wing English media circles, she was skewered for it in an endless replay of the “Wee Jimmy Krankie” jibes. This was not a “joke” but an insult not just to her but to women and all Scots and came from an innate sense of superiority.
It’s not that Sturgeon has lacked humour, laughing with the rest of us in lockdown at the Janet Godley voiceovers of her manning the podium during the covid daily briefings.
She certainly needed the respite, appearing day after day, in a crisis she describes as the worst she faced in her career.
She worked tirelessly, steering Scotland through Covid, while Johnson skipped Cobra meetings and partied.
Yesterday she said: “I feel more and more each day now that the fixed opinions people increasingly have about me, some fair and others a little more than caricature, are being used as barriers to reasoned debate in our country.”
There is truth to this and she is so dominant in our political landscape she has become the symbol of a polarised debate.
There are those, like Alex Salmond who’d paint her as the death knell of independence while others see her as the defibrillator which jolted it into life.
Sturgeon can see there is no bridging of the deep divides between the two fundamentalist sides of the trans rights argument.
The trans issue and her controversial insistence the general election is a de-facto referendum have been cited as contributing to her resignation.
But she says neither those, nor any of the myriad of political problems she faces constitute “a final straw”.
The humility in her speech yesterday, exemplified her key reasoning that she is human and she is done.
She said: “I’m not expecting violins here but I am a human being as well as a politician.”
Her resignation speech mirrored that of the New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Adern, their names often uttered in the same breath.
It takes guts, perhaps the kind women tend to have, to admit you have had enough.
In a political sphere where too often macho men seem to play a game of who can pee the highest, it is refreshingly honest.
There is a fundamental morality to her in politics increasingly nestling into the gutter and Scotland’s head lifted higher for it.
Sturgeon has vowed to stay in the fight but there is clearly a longing there for a life beyond the gruelling diary of an FM, to indulge in her love of books, friends and her family.
Whatever her political legacy and her write-up in history, human is one description of Sturgeon that will linger long.
It is what made her relatable, not just to women but to so many Scots.
Whatever her mistakes, the heart was there to do the right thing and she brought a spotlight to the decency embedded in Scotland’s DNA.
Though not all Scots will thank her for it, there are many across this nation who will.
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