DECLINE AND FALL OF THE STURGEON EMPIRE

She was the most powerful female in UK politics, but her house of cards came crashing down in 12 tumultuous month's

IT is a year since Nicola Sturgeon's resignation but it feels like a lifetime since she was a stateswoman revered across the world.

Then Sturgeon was the antidote to the public school prigs and populist strongmen. But not now.

Her flag is no longer planted firmly on the moral high ground, not since the police investigations, the inquiries, the missing WhatsApp messages and the lingering whiff of scandal.

In April 2021, a study by the University of Bristol and Kings College London found 65 percent of Scottish people trusted the First Minister on Covid-19. Only 24 percent said the same of Boris Johnson.

Sturgeon still has her followers and she received a standing ovation at the SNP conference last year but such high levels of public trust in her would be unthinkable today.

In 2021, we were a year into the pandemic when Sturgeon seemed such a steady hand, steering Scotland through unfathomable crisis.

This in sharp contrast to a fort-night ago when, tearfully, she gave evidence to the Covid inquiry, her excuses ringing hollow for what happened to those missing WhatsApp messages.

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar later claimed Sturgeon "lied" to a journalist when she told them she had preserved WhatsApp messages which the inquiry would want to see.

If Johnson, whose messages also vanished, was, as she called him, a "f****** clown", then what did that make her? A hypocrite at best.

Less than two years before she quit, Sturgeon had graced the pages of Vogue, feted by the glossy as the most powerful woman in British politics.

She had politically outlived her fellow female leaders in the Scottish parliament, Labour's Kezia Dugdale and the Tory Ruth Davidson.

She declared herself then "the last woman standing".