Nicola Sturgeon interview - the SNP reset that 'didn't happen' and Humza Yousaf's 'catastrophic' error

Ms Sturgeon stood down in February 2023, fearing she had become a “polarising” figure in UK politics - a status she said stood in the way of progressing her party’s agenda.

But her hopes for a reset at the top of the Scottish Government have not come to fruition, she told interviewers from the Institute for Government (IfG).

Speaking to the think-tank in October in an interview published for the first time today, the former first minister – the longest to hold the office in the 25 years since devolution – also said her successor Humza Yousaf’s decision to end the SNP’s power-sharing deal with the Scottish Greens had been “catastrophic”.

Ms Sturgeon said: “I had become a polarising figure. I think it turns out I was wrong about this, but I convinced myself that if I took myself out somebody else would be able to reset things.

“Obviously that didn’t happen and hasn’t happened.”

Following her resignation and a tense leadership race, Mr Yousaf took over as first minister and was widely seen as a continuity figure, hailing from the same wing of the party as Ms Sturgeon.

When Mr Yousaf resigned after collapsing the Bute House Agreement with the Scottish Greens, John Swinney – Ms Sturgeon’s deputy for her entire time in Bute House – took the reins.

In a wide-ranging interview with the think-tank, Ms Sturgeon said her handling of the pandemic was what pushed her to quit, describing it as having taken a toll “physically and mentally”.

She said: “I had lost my appetite for the cut and thrust of politics a little bit. You can say politics can be too cut and thrust sometimes – and sometimes it is – but as a political leader you need to have that.

“You can’t survive in the jungle of politics without it and I had definitely lost it through the experience of Covid.”

She also admitted to having made “lots of mistakes”, saying “I regret big infrastructure failures” like the repeated delays and cost overruns to two ferries being built at the Ferguson Marine shipyard in Port Glasgow, Inverclyde.

On Mr Yousaf’s decision to axe the deal with the Greens, Ms Sturgeon said: “I think crashing that agreement was catastrophic and – politics aside – totally the wrong thing to do for stable government.”

Her comments came as Mr Yousaf spoke about his own “real regret” at the speed at which he ended the deal.

He told the Institute for Government he wished he had “taken more time to speak it through and come to some kind of almost mutual agreement” with Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater, the co-leaders of the Greens who were both junior ministers under the deal.

Mr Yousaf recalled his phone had been “burning hot” with calls for him to end the deal after “a really difficult interview” in which Mr Harvie failed to adhere to the Scottish Government’s “collective responsibility line” on the Cass Review into gender identity services.

Ms Sturgeon also reflected on the relationship she had with the five UK prime ministers who were in place during her tenure.

“With David Cameron, there was a sense of trying to understand how devolution worked and what that meant for the decisions he took,” she said.

“With Theresa [May], I think Brexit just overwhelmed her. I’m not sure there would have been that understanding even without it. But certainly with Brexit I just don’t think she had the bandwidth to really work out devolution.

“I didn’t really get to meet Liz Truss. Boris [Johnson] was Boris. Trying to work with Boris was just impossible, end of.

“Rishi [Sunak] I think intellectually got devolution, but I think the political pressures on him meant that he was always going to go in the other direction.”

Asked about her views on the current Labour-led UK government, she said her impression – formed from conversations with current Scottish ministers – is it is “more rhetoric than substance and I don’t get the sense that there’s any meaningful change in approach - but we’ll see”.