Nicola Sturgeon

Hannah White (HW): Starting at the beginning, you entered government in 2007, becoming cabinet secretary for health and wellbeing and deputy first minister. What was your first day in office like?

Nicola Sturgeon (NS): It was a bit bewildering. I came into office with no prior experience of government. I had many years of experience in opposition, so I had viewed government from the outside, but it doesn’t give you a very accurate sense of what it’s really like. Most people come into government with no training or any real preparation for being a minister, which is one of the weaknesses of the system – although one that is not immediately obvious how to fix.

I was immediately taken into a room with colleagues and introduced to the private secretaries. One of the things that vividly sticks in my mind is that Sir John Elvidge – the permanent secretary of the Scottish government at the time – said something that was really obvious but made me really sit up. He said that “when you’re a minister, you’re never off duty. You might be on holiday, you might be having an evening off, but you're never not a minister.” So that responsibility is with you literally 24/7, which is quite a sobering moment even if it's quite an obvious thing.

Then you very quickly have to get to grips with every aspect of government and how it works structurally. As the health secretary, I was taken into a room with about 20 people who were the directors within the health department of the Scottish government. You have to very quickly work out who everybody is, where they sit in the hierarchy, how they relate to you, what they're responsible for and how you can use them to deliver the things you want to do.

My final observation about the first day is that very quickly – probably on the first day and certainly within the first couple of days – I changed what I would describe as my prejudice about the civil service. I think when you're in opposition – particularly, perhaps, representing a party like mine – you have a sense that the civil service is there to frustrate government, to stop you doing things and to make it difficult for you to make real change. I realised very quickly that wasn't the case. There are good and less good officials, but generally as an institution the civil service is there to help government deliver and to help ministers do their jobs.

To sum it up, just as any new minister will find, it's bewildering. It's pretty daunting and intimidating at first. Looking back on it, I would say it's really important to get certain things properly established in the first few days. If you don't do that, you become the servant of a machine – as opposed to the informed and always listening but nevertheless master of the machine you should be.

HW: Can I just dig into what you said there about your perception of the civil service – do you mean that you felt the civil service was not facilitating your predecessors in government or that you thought they wouldn’t facilitate what your party wanted?

NS: I think it probably was an impression or a perception. I used the word prejudice and that probably is the correct word. It wasn’t based really on any actual experience. I suppose if you ask most people what civil servants are there to do, they will say that they are bureaucrats who are there to slow things down, keep things pretty much as they are and make it difficult. I had that perception.

I suppose for a party like mine that wants to effectively – to use pejorative language – break up the British state they serve, there was a sense that they would be particularly obstructive towards us. But that was not borne out at all.

HW: In 2012, you moved to become cabinet secretary for infrastructure, capital investment and cities. How did you feel about making that change at that point?

NS: By that point, I had been the health secretary for five-and-a-half years. I was – and probably still am – the longest serving health secretary in Scotland. It's a job that gets under your skin. It's a very tough job, although not as tough then as it is now. I was very emotionally attached to that job, so it was quite a wrench to leave it. I think people probably don’t appreciate how big a wrench it is to leave office, particularly if you’ve been a minister for a long time.

Though I took on the responsibilities you have just described, the reason for the move was to spearhead the Scottish government’s referendum campaign. That was obviously a big, onerous but exciting responsibility, so that tempered the sense of loss I felt in leaving the health job.

Akash Paun (AP): In 2011, the SNP won a majority and David Cameron agreed there was a legitimate mandate for a referendum. How did that decision by the prime minister come about? Were you surprised by it?

NS: The decision was taken by him. Obviously we wanted to have a referendum and we felt we had a mandate for one. If memory serves me correctly, he announced it on The Andrew Marr Show on a Sunday morning. He hadn’t done that in consultation with the Scottish government, so in the moment it came a bit out of the blue. It hadn’t been something we were anticipating at that point. I think in the moment he thought it was a masterstroke and that he'd wrong-footed the independence campaign. Looking back, I think that probably wasn’t quite the case.

We quickly got our ducks in a row and started to do the work. Obviously we had to accelerate a lot of the planning and work that was already underway.

AP: You were one of the signatories to the Edinburgh Agreement which set out the terms under which the referendum would take place. What was your experience of the negotiations with the UK government on this matter? What were the key compromises that you had to strike?

NS: I took over the negotiation pretty close to the conclusion of it – although those two things are connected. The negotiations had been running for months and had been going nowhere particularly fast. I think both governments were just circling each other and really refusing to get to the nitty gritty of the compromises and the bones of the agreement. So part of the reason for me taking over the job at that point was to get the deal done.

When I moved into the negotiating seat for the Scottish government, things started to move much more quickly. Michael Moore was secretary of state for Scotland at the time, so he was on the other side, and we had a very, very good relationship. We both had red lines. To this day, we might guess, but we would not be completely clear, what the other side’s real red lines were and what the fake red lines were for negotiating purposes. I think the first time we met we had a one-to-one that was meant to be five minutes and ended up longer than that. Although there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing after, the shape of the deal pretty much emerged in that first meeting.

From the Scottish government’s side, the absolute red line was that this had to be a referendum made in Scotland. The big decisions around franchise and precise timing had to be decisions taken by the Scottish parliament. That effectively is what happened, so from my point of view we got everything we wanted. From their side – but obviously Michael would have to speak to this – having it within a certain defined time scale and it being a single question referendum were important. That might be one of the issues where there was a wee bit of shadow boxing for a while.

But I think both sides came away from it thinking we'd got what we needed. To this day, I think the Edinburgh Agreement is a model of how governments that have very different positions on the substance of an issue, but want to agree a process of resolving it, should work together and come up with that process. I do think the Edinburgh Agreement is something that should be held up as an example of good government, to be frank.

AP: Obviously the result of the referendum didn’t go the way that you had wanted, but looking back now, how well prepared do you think the Scottish government actually was for independence? What was the plan for day one had Scotland voted ‘Yes’?

NS: By the time we got to referendum day, how prepared were we? Exceptionally prepared. Now, that's not to say it would have been easy to navigate the issues we would then have had, far from it. Nor is it to say that there would not have been unexpected twists and turns in these issues. It would have been a tough process. There are issues where I do look back and think, “if only we’d been a bit more prepared.” I’m not sure it would have been possible on some of those issues, just in the nature of some of the debates. I think we were as prepared as it was possible to be. The white paper – which people can and do argue over the substance of – was probably the most substantial blueprint for constitutional change, certainly in a UK context, that there's ever been.

Probably my saddest task on the day after the referendum was to go into the floor of St Andrew’s House where the transition team all sat at their desks with nothing to do. We had a team across all of the different areas of government ready to jump into action had the vote gone the other way. In the final few days, there was a reasonable sense that it might have done.

AP: Were there particular aspects of the process where you were concerned about how they might play out?

NS: When you're the proponents of change and you’re trying to paint a picture of a future that is very different to the status quo, there are certain questions you can never answer definitively. That is true of life in general, but that’s really magnified in a process like the independence referendum. 

I look at currency for example. It would be great if we'd had a more definitive answer to the “But what if your plan A doesn't work?” question. But in reality, if we had come up with plan B, the attack would have been, “What if that doesn’t work? What’s your plan C?”  In some circumstances, no matter how hard you try, you're never going to satisfy that desire for cast iron certainty. I suppose that that’s the kind of thing I'm talking about. The things I’m saying that it would have been nice to have are things that it would have been impossible to have in cast iron certainty about the future.

Millie Mitchell (MM): After the referendum Alex Salmond stepped down as first minister and SNP leader, and you quickly succeeded him. Were there any particular lessons you had learned about leadership from working alongside him? ⁴ This interview was conducted four days before the death of Alex Salmond on 12 October 2024.

NS: I learned a lot of very positive things from Alex. He was my mentor for much of my political career. I learned a lot about campaigning from him. I learned a lot about governing from him, although when we were in government together, I think it's probably fair to say that a lot of the heavy lifting and very detailed work of government fell to me and John Swinney. I also learned that it's not always good to fly by the seat of your pants. Sometimes it's inevitable, sometimes it's desirable, but it's not always good to do it. 

So I learned a lot from Alex. I'm not trying to re-write history, most of it was good. As anybody will from somebody they have watched in a job, you learn things to try to emulate, but you also learn things that you should try to do differently. My successors as first minister will have done exactly the same with me over the past couple of years.

MM: Was there anything that you tried to do differently in your approach to leadership?

NS: I think anybody who could speak in any detail about Alex’s style in government and mine would say – in the pejorative way of putting it – that I’m more of a micromanager. How I would describe it is that I've got more of an attention to detail. I like to have more of a sense of what's happening and a grip on what's happening. Alex tended to be bigger picture and leave a lot of the detailed work to other people, which at the time was good because he trusted me. I think in my five-and-a-half years as health secretary, I could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of detailed conversations I had with Alex about problems in the health service, because he trusted me to get on with it. Obviously we would talk about it in general terms. 

I'm not saying one way is right and one way is wrong. A lot of it comes down to personal style as well, and no two people will ever do the same job identically.

MM: In terms of policy, coming in as first minister, did you see your role as providing continuity or were there ways in which you consciously sought to change the Scottish government’s direction?

NS: I had been the deputy first minister, so I think it would have been odd if I had come in and said we were going to junk everything we’d done. I was a deputy first minister who had had a big role in the shape and direction of the government, so it was more continuity than change. 

But I think there were differences in emphasis between Alex and I. We would both describe ourselves as ‘social democrat’ in terms of our positioning on the political spectrum. I think economically, socially and culturally, he's probably a bit more right than me. He's not right-wing. I would position us both in the centre-left of politics, but he's a bit more to the right than I am. So I think that led to a difference in emphasis.

I won't overplay this but I also think it's important not to underplay it. I think gender has a big role to play sometimes in both style of government and substance of government.

HW: Would you like to say any more about what that difference is?

NS: Two of the policies I feel proudest of are the very significant expansion of childcare and the Scottish Child Payment which – although there are countervailing pressures – is having a big impact on lifting kids out of poverty. I think childcare is actually an infrastructure policy as much as a social policy. But I guess I would be seen as putting more emphasis on social policy than what would be traditionally described as economic policy, although I think that distinction is often a bit overplayed.

HW: One of the things we find very interesting about the Scottish government is the move in 2007 to abolish government departments to attempt a more flexible and joined-up approach to policy areas, with a single national performance framework to guide it. Do you have any observations about whether that different way of organising government has made a difference? What do you think the strengths or drawbacks are?

NS: I think it was the right thing to do. Never having really worked in the previous structure, it's hard for me to compare and contrast. But I do think the approach of trying to make things more joined-up and holistic was the right thing to do. I instinctively feel that probably made a positive difference.

I think the national performance framework and the outcomes and objectives underneath it help to focus and structure the work of government. One of the things I think ministers struggle with most – but that is also one of the most important things – is to not get too lost in the weeds and always see the bigger picture. Certainly in theory, the national performance framework is a tool to help do that.

My observation – which I suspect will be true in countries all over the world – is that, although structures are important, ultimately it’s people who make them work or not work. I think there is a human instinct – which then leads to the institutional drift – towards siloed work. People get very focused on their own area of responsibility. I think one of the perennial struggles in government – even in a government as relatively small as the Scottish government – is to keep people thinking about how their work relates to somebody else’s and how the whole thing hangs together. So I think the changes we made in 2007 and the national performance framework all help with that. Do they mean that it’s perfect or that that’s not still a big challenge? I wouldn’t say that.

HW: Do you have any observations about the way in which you organised your office as first minister and the way in which you balanced official advice with political advice?

NS: Again, this will vary between administrations and even different ministers, but certainly in my experience I think it is something that works reasonably well. There is a difference in the Scottish government in that individual ministers don't have their own special advisers. All special advisers are special advisers to the first minister and then they're given portfolio responsibilities. In practise they do work with individual ministers, but they are all accountable to the first minister. So I think that, coupled with the fact that it's a smaller administration, probably has helped avoid some of the turf wars between special advisers that you see in Whitehall.

There's always a tension between officials and political advisors, but I think that in our administrations it has worked reasonably well. That tension has tended to be reasonably constructive and we haven't really had the issues around special advisers that have been seen elsewhere.

HW: In the Scotland Act 2016, major new functions were devolved including over income tax and aspects of social security. What would you say are the most significant things that having those powers enabled you to achieve?

NS: Firstly, reforming the system of income tax, which I think we did in 2017/18. We changed the band structure and our income tax system is definitely more progressive because of that and raises more revenue than it would have done otherwise. I don't think – and I don't think the evidence bears out – that it has had a disincentive effect in terms of investment or movement into Scotland. 

So that’s one of the two most significant things. The other big significant thing was the establishment of Social Security Scotland, which has then allowed us to introduce the Scottish Child Payment for example. So these were both massive in the context of the Scottish government. These were policy areas where we had to set up Revenue Scotland and Social Security Scotland – so organisationally these were big undertakings. And then using those devolved powers in substantive ways were big things for us.

There is a real imbalance in the Scotland Act in my view. One of the things that the UK government put in relatively late in its progress – which was seen as a good thing and it was very difficult for us to say wasn’t but it was very much a poisoned pill – was that we can establish any benefit we want but we don’t have corresponding revenue raising powers to pay for it. You see that imbalance played out in political debate all the time here. There is that constant call to do things to mitigate policies from London or establish new benefits. That is all well and good, and we've done a lot of that, but the revenue raising powers are still terribly constrained.

AP: One of the other things going on in this period was Brexit. How successful do you feel you were at defending Scotland's interests in the negotiations with Westminster?

NS: Not at all! It wasn’t for the want of trying. I was negotiating with successive prime ministers, but the bulk of it was with Theresa May [prime minister from 2016–19]. She had a terrible predicament to get a deal and ultimately didn’t manage to do it. It was almost as if she was like, “I can’t have something else that I have to try and balance. I have got too much on.” She wouldn’t even really acknowledge the democratic deficit for Scotland or the very real implications. So not at all [successful].

I think Boris [Johnson] actually admits in his book that the [United Kingdom] Internal Market Act [2020] was in a large part an ability to constrain the powers of the devolved administrations. That is how it has been and is being used. I think the independence referendum, my party’s continued success over many years and fears of another independence referendum and what that might mean, have led to a sense of Westminster trying to put devolution back in its box. Brexit has definitely provided some of the tools to do that in the name of something else. 

If I go back to some of the things we did, a policy I spearheaded when I was health secretary was alcohol minimum pricing. Arguably it is one of the most important public health measures this parliament has introduced. The evidence is starting to bear this out, but I'm convinced that policy will save countless lives of people who would otherwise have drunk themselves to death. If we were trying to introduce that now, I don't think Westminster would let us. I think the Internal Market Act would be used politically, but in the name of the single UK market, to stop us doing it.

AP: Just after Theresa May became prime minister, she came up and met with you in Edinburgh and committed at that point to proceeding with a four nation approach to Brexit. As you say that ultimately did not happen…

NS: It didn’t ultimately not happen – it didn’t make it out the door of Bute House. The interpretation I would put on that statement – and the interpretation most people with any sense of understanding in Scotland would put on that statement – is not what she meant by it. She'd have to say what she meant by it, but I think it was just a nice sounding thing to say that was never translated into any actual policy approach.

AP: Do you think that there was in theory a potential agreement on Brexit that you could have reached or were you just too far apart on the very principle of Brexit?

NS: It frustrated me at the time and looking back on it, it frustrates me. Theresa and I, coming from very different political perspectives, probably had more in common than was acknowledged… She was struggling with the expectations of a party that she was trying to navigate her way through. I was doing the same in a very different context. 

There was definitely a single market, customs union deal that could have been done. I would have taken a bit of heat from my own party who would have seen that as a sellout on EU membership. She would have taken heat from her party because it wasn't true Brexit. But you know, there was potentially a deal that could be done. The EU would have had to have played ball here and there would have been no guarantee of that. Although from my conversations, had the UK government got behind it, there would have been an appetite to talk.

There could have been a sort of Northern Irish type opt-out for Scotland to some extent. That would have had a lot of practical issues to work through, but it would definitely have been something that could have been explored, had there been any appetite to do it.

MM: In your resignation speech, you said that leading Scotland through the Covid pandemic was one of the toughest things you’ve ever done. Could you tell us a little more about what that was like for you personally as first minister?

NS: I think it’s probably pretty obvious. In theory every decision a minister – particularly a first minister or a health minister – takes, if you work it far enough down the line, you can describe it as a life or death decision in some kind of way. But suddenly you're taking decisions that are literally life and death, where whatever decision you take will have a bad outcome. There are no good outcomes. There are no good decisions to be taken. They are of a significance and an order that is just way beyond anything you could ever have imagined before. So there is a weight of personal responsibility because of the magnitude of these decisions and the unprecedented nature of what you're asking people to do. Boris talks about this in his book actually, I just didn’t see any sign of him feeling it at the time. Of course you've got cabinet government, but ultimately the buck stops with you.

So the weight of all of that over such an extended period of time, knowing that if you lock down there is untold harm to kids losing schooling, people potentially losing their jobs and people becoming isolated, but if you don’t lock down more people will die or get seriously ill. The weight of those decisions over an extended period of time was pretty horrendous.

MM: What was your experience of working with UK ministers during that time?

NS: It wasn't easy. There were times when it wasn’t as bad as it might have been painted to be. I think there was a definite before-Boris-getting-ill and after-Boris-getting-ill sense to it. Not because he suddenly became very serious, but because he absented himself from direct discussions with the devolved administrations. Michael Gove [chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster and minister for the cabinet office at the time] pretty much occupied that space. That wasn't terrible. Michael Gove was reasonable to work with in that he at least would try to listen to the points we were making, but it didn’t always translate into outcomes. Not that we would ever have expected to get everything we wanted. But at least there was a sense of shared working.

But there was a fundamental inability – on the part of some people in the Whitehall machine it would have been an inability and on the part of others it would have been a refusal – to recognise the roles and responsibilities of the devolved administrations. Mark Drakeford [first minister of Wales, 2018–24] I'm sure would say the same. They couldn't, or wouldn’t, get their heads around the fact that they couldn't just take a blanket approach and that we were responsible for public health decisions, we were responsible for much of what flowed from those decisions and therefore we were all equal partners in these decisions. They saw themselves very much as the lead government and expected us all just to do what they thought was right. 

There was also a real difficulty where all four of the nations had responsibility to take public health decisions, but only the Treasury could make decisions on the financing of what came next. Unfortunately I have no great expectation that that will be something that comes out of the whole process of inquiries into Covid – in the sense of people looking at it and saying that has to change. If it does, it will be to go in the wrong direction of trying to centralise public health decisions. But it is something that really should be properly addressed.

MM: During your time as first minister, there were five different UK prime ministers. What was your experience of working with them?

NS: It was interesting to see the different personalities. I was going to say it made it difficult to establish as good a relationship as you might have wanted. But to be blunt, would that have happened even if there had been one prime minister in place all through my time in office? Because the politics were obviously very challenging, particularly post-Brexit.

With David Cameron [prime minister 2010–16], there was a sense of trying to understand how devolution worked and what that meant for the decisions he took. With Theresa [May, prime minister 2016–19], 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 [prime minister September to October 2022]. Boris [Johnson, prime minister 2019–22] was Boris. Trying to work with Boris was just impossible, end of. Rishi [Sunak, prime minister 2022–24] 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, which was to try to use the Internal Market Act to centralise things.

AP: We’ve now got another prime minister [Keir Starmer] who has spoken about the need for a reset of relations with Holyrood and the other devolved governments. What do you think a genuine reset should look like? What do you think the prime minister ought to do? And do you get the impression he is likely to do it?

NS: I’m not in government, so I’m not seeing that relationship directly. From what I gather from my former colleagues, I think at the moment 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.

What a meaningful change of approach would look like, would be getting Whitehall to properly understand devolved responsibility – not just in Scotland but in Wales and Northern Ireland too. Then to operate in a way that respects those responsibilities and to have an open mind to dealing with some of the inbuilt systemic imbalances and whether they can be worked out. In my view, it would be an approach that stopped using the Internal Market Act, or obscure provisions of the Scotland Act, to effectively ride roughshod over democratic decision making in the devolved administrations. 

In Scotland – and it may have some relevance in Wales but it already exists in Northern Ireland – to establish a process for having a referendum. If we can get an agreement to go back down the Edinburgh Agreement route, then what are the circumstances that would have to exist for Westminster to agree a referendum? There is obviously that approach in terms of an Irish referendum. It may not be the case that it should be identical in Scotland or Wales, but there definitely needs to be a process that that is founded on respect for democratic autonomy, basically.

HW: While you were first minister, the SNP was first a minority government and then following the 2021 elections, you entered the Bute House Agreement. Did you have to change the way in which you were leading in those different circumstances? 

NS: 2021 and the Bute House Agreement was when I felt things change. Obviously with Covid things were weird for a couple of years before that, but until then whether we had a majority or not was not the key factor in being able to get things through parliament. The key factor actually was the dynamic of politics. I think that is always the case. 

The key dynamic is who fears and who doesn't fear an election. So if you're a minority government and you're the party that fears an election, your life will be a misery because the opposition will just beat you at every opportunity. But if you go back to 2007, I don't think we really thought we'd last the year as a minority. In 2009, we didn't get the our budget through here, everybody thought the government was going to fall. But what quickly became obvious was that our opponents feared an election more than we did, so it might have been difficult at times but we would always end up getting things through because they didn't want the alternative. The overall dynamic of politics at the time tends to be the most important factor.

Globally and not just in Scotland, politics is much more polarised and toxic. That was definitely playing out by 2021 here, which we obviously all saw through the Salmond saga, so everything was very toxic and very polarised. After the 2021 election, we were one short of a majority. We would have been able to govern effectively with that. But I felt it would be more stable, lead to less horse trading and be a better use of public money, if we had a partnership agreement with the Greens, rather than having them hold us to ransom for hundreds of millions of pounds at every single budget. We did an overall agreement and I think that was the right thing to do. I think crashing that agreement was catastrophic and – politics aside – totally the wrong thing to do for stable government. I think that's been played out. Again, it was the dynamic of politics rather than the pure arithmetic that led me to that decision.

AP: During that period, you made the case for another referendum on independence. Ultimately that route was closed by the Supreme Court as well as the refusal of prime ministers to facilitate it. Looking back, do you think there was anything different you could have done to secure a different outcome?

NS: In a process sense, maybe there was and somebody much cleverer than me has to come up with it. But I don't think so. When you're basically banging your head against a firmly shut and locked door, other than trying to kick it down – at times it felt as if I was trying to do that – I’m not sure.

What would have made the difference and what I think will ultimately make the difference – whether it’s through the section 30 route [the legislative mechanism that enabled the 2014 referendum] as is or some different process of agreeing the terms of when a referendum should happen – is popular demand. I think what would have made the difference would have been getting levels of support for independence, not just higher in absolute terms but with more of a sense of kind of urgency behind it. Not just people saying we support independence, but we support it as a priority and we want to decide it now. I think the highest level of support for independence during my time as first minister was, ironically, during the pandemic. I was consumed with the pandemic at the time. I think to try to galvanise that would have been wrong but also very difficult. 

When you have a situation where one side of the negotiation holds all the cards legally and holds the power of veto, you can beat yourself up – as I have done many times over the years – that it’s your failure as a negotiator that is the problem, and maybe at times it is. But when you’re up against somebody who doesn't want what you want and actually holds all the legal power, there's always going be a limit to what you can do.

AP: Turning to another big objective of your government that hasn’t yet happened, why do you think it has continued to prove so difficult to create a national care service?

NS: In terms of why it’s got to where it has got to now, you would have to ask incumbent ministers. I’m not close enough to it. 
It was always going to be a difficult thing to do. I was very involved in the mechanics and the practicalities. We faced local government hostility. We certainly faced some trade union concern, although I think that was manageable. So when I left office, I thought it was a very significant challenge, but one that was absolutely doable and one that was really important to do. I think it's regrettable that for whatever reason it seems to have run as deeply into the sand as it has.

MM: In your resignation speech, you spoke about the toll that being first minister had on yourself personally and the need for Scottish politics to have a new voice. What was the turning point that led you to the decision to step down?

NS: It was not one single thing. But if there was a single thing, I think it was Covid. I think it probably took me a bit of time coming out of the pandemic to really properly appreciate just the toll it had taken on me physically and mentally. Without labouring that, I was totally exhausted by that point. I also think, because of Covid, 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. So the polarisation of politics – which would never have been great to deal with – I just found increasingly impossible to deal with in my own mind. 

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, but that's a more global phenomenon.

It's the kind of job that if you can't give it one hundred percent all of the time, you shouldn’t do it. I got to the point where I could have given it a hundred percent for a bit longer, but I didn't want to.

MM: You have also described being first minister as ‘the best job in the world’. Is there a specific achievement you’re most proud of from that time?

NS: There is so much I am very proud of. Obviously there are lots of things I wish I'd done better or differently and things that I didn't even try to do that I wish I had. 

The Scottish Child Payment... I think there will be kids today that grow up into adulthood with better opportunity and better success in life because of that policy now making a real difference. Similarly with the expansion of childcare. It’s still got a way to go, but I think the work we've done, and are still doing, has already transformed life for a lot of care-experienced young people. I’m also proud of the work we did, and that is still ongoing, around the renewable energy revolution, particularly in offshore wind. So there are loads of things that I'm very proud when I look back. 

But like everything in every government everywhere, everything for time immemorial is a work-in-progress.

AP: What do you think was the biggest mistake you made as first minister?

NS: I made lots of mistakes. I regret big infrastructure failures, like ferries that people talk about all the time. I could sit here for the next four or five hours and tell you why I think that went wrong, but probably you're not interested. There's loads of things; I wouldn't single out one single mistake. I think it's important to reflect on and learn from mistakes, but maybe I'm just at the stage of my life and career where I'm not particularly interested in sort of consuming myself with it anymore. Other people will do that for me.

HW: Finally, what advice would you give to a minister coming into office for the first time?

NS: Firstly, remember that you're the decision maker, so listen, take advice, but don't outsource your decisions to officials or political advisers. You're the boss effectively. I don't say that as an ego thing, but you're accountable, you're elected, you're the one that has to stand or fall on your decisions.

Give yourself space to think. If you allow it, the system will consume you with paperwork and your packed diary, not out of any malice but just because of how it works. Make sure you've got time to think because that will lead to better decision making.

Don't forget to look at the bigger picture. Don't sweat the small stuff. Don't get caught in the weeds. Always take a step back and think about why you're doing something, not just what it is you're doing.