'Keep the Promise': Nicola Sturgeon's final words to Holyrood - but did she keep hers?

Improving the lives of Scotland’s care experienced children and young people formed part of her self-declared defining mission as First Minister and here she was, using The Promise to say farewell.

Farewell after half her life as an MSP, farewell to a building “where I am in with the bricks”.

Her voice cracked three times but did not break.

In her first speech, in 1999 and not in this chamber but in the temporary parliament on The Mound, Ms Sturgeon spoke of the vital importance of enshrining social justice in everything Holyrood would go on to do.

Does she feel that she has kept that promise? Her speech did not consider the question.

For critics, Ms Sturgeon allowed some open goals. She boasted of having the best constituency in Scotland “bar none” (how would you know; are you ever there?).

She gave advice to incumbent MSPs to reach across the party divide. “Your opponents need not be your enemy” (Seriously?)

MSP Willie Rennie took the opportunity to remind Ms Sturgeon she had once called him a “pathetic attention seeker” (takes one to know one).

The former First Minister should worry none, he added. Mr Rennie is blessed with three older sisters and has presumably heard worse.

The Liberal Democrat was unique among his peers in eschewing a fully formed speech read from an iPad. Instead he spoke from a mind map impressively scrawled across an A3 sheet of paper that he folded away when done.

The arc of history, Ms Sturgeon went on, does not “automatically bend towards justice. It must always be pushed that way.”

Her speech detailed how, a decade ago, a group of care experienced young people reminded her of this fact.

“Scotland will not be a fair and equal country until those who spend their childhoods in care enjoy the same support, stability and love.”

Love was the watchword of the chamber. “Let me underline that word,” Ms Sturgeon added.

Ms Sturgeon, she said, may have been the First Minister who made The Promise but “the real place in history will belong to the First Minister who keeps the promise.

“I hope with all my heart that will be my friend, John Swinney.”

With her eye on the clock, Ms Sturgeon then asked the presiding officer to indulge her. She need not have worried - Ross Greer of the Scottish Greens had donated part of his speaking time.

“This session of parliament has been the most fractious and divided” she has experienced (Whose fault is that?).

In what she termed “advice to her younger self”, Ms Sturgeon counselled incumbent politicians that their opposition need not be their enemy.

“Don’t forgot to think for yourself,” she added. “Keep a sense of perspective”. Not everything is an outrage or a scandal.

“Don’t live life on social media”.

Perhaps if MSPs wish to make a farewell speech, there be a separate forum for it.

For this should have been a debate about the passage of a vital bill that will have a crucial impact on the lives of some of the country’s most vulnerable children.

In the consecutive speech, the independent MSP Jeremy Balfour said he “hoped” the legislation would competently interact with existing legislation, given the parliament has been taken to task previously for its drafting failures.

Certainty, not hope, should be the guiding principle of legislators. Legislative debates that will alter the lives of vulnerable children and young people should not be a forum for backslapping.

But such practicalities must seem churlish during emotional goodbyes.

Encapsulating a 27-year political career spanning several of the most tumultuous, controversial, unsettled times of devolution is a tough task.

How to end it? Ms Sturgeon chose three words: “Keep the promise”. A bold assertion for a politician, but one, it may be conceded, who has never shied from boldness.