Who is Nicola Sturgeon, former SNP leader and Scottish first minister?

Nicola Sturgeon has been an MSP for more than 25 years

Nicola Sturgeon has announced that she will step down after 27 years as an MSP, including more than eight as first minister of Scotland.

She became Scotland's first female leader, and was the longest-serving occupant of Bute House.

But she will leave parliament without achieving the one overriding ambition which first sparked her interest in politics as a teenager - Scottish independence.

Sturgeon was born in Irvine in 1970, a "working class girl from Ayrshire".

She was already an SNP stalwart in her teens, campaigning for the party in the 1987 general election.

Nicola Sturgeon was born in Irvine in 1970

It was Margaret Thatcher who inspired her to enter politics, she said, claiming to hate everything the Tory politician stood for.

Sturgeon insisted the argument for independence was purely political and economic - and had never really been about identity.

Her own grandmother was from the north of England, and indeed she would later say she wished the Scottish National Party could be renamed, as she found the word nationalism "difficult".

By 1992, at the age of 21, she was selected as a candidate herself, standing in the Glasgow Shettleston constituency where she was beaten by Labour by 15,000 votes.

Her ambition was undiminished and she went on to stand in a series of council and Westminster contests.

At the same time, she graduated in law from the University of Glasgow, and worked for two years as a solicitor in the city.

Sturgeon was first elected to the Scottish Parliament in 1999

Her political career fully took off with the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, where Sturgeon won a Glasgow seat on the regional list ballot.

The SNP became the main opposition to the Labour-Lib Dem coalition running the new parliament, and Sturgeon took up a series of shadow briefs - first on education, and later on health.

When John Swinney resigned as SNP leader in 2004, she pitched herself into a leadership contest against Roseanna Cunningham. But the race changed when Alex Salmond decided to return and throw his hat into the ring.

Salmond and Sturgeon sealed a pact which saw Sturgeon run as Salmond's deputy - and also as effectively his representative in the Scottish Parliament, given he was an MP and not an MSP at the time.

It also meant she became deputy first minister - as well as health secretary - when the SNP took power in 2007.

Sturgeon won the constituency of Glasgow Govan at that election, and has comfortably held the Glasgow Southside seat since it was created in 2011.

Sturgeon played a crucial role in the 2014 independence referendum campaign

In 2010, she married the SNP's chief executive, Peter Murrell.

The couple never had children but Ms Sturgeon later revealed the painful experience of suffering a miscarriage when she was 40, shortly before the 2011 Scottish parliamentary election campaign.

"Sometimes having a baby just doesn't happen - no matter how much we might want it to," she said.

She said she talked about it because she hoped it might challenge some of the assumptions and judgements that are still made about women - especially in politics - who don't have children.

Sturgeon also played a crucial role during the 2014 independence referendum campaign, when she often took the lead as the "Yes minister".

Daily briefings were broadcast during the Covid pandemic

It was the failure of that campaign which led her to the very top of Scottish politics, with Salmond stepping down after Scottish voters rejected independence by 55% to 45%.

This time, Sturgeon was the only candidate in the leadership race - and she swept to power in rock star style, embarking on a stadium tour to announce herself as Scotland's first female first minister.

Momentum was behind the SNP, and the party delivered a historic landslide in the 2015 general election, winning 56 of the 59 seats in Scotland.

Sturgeon followed that with another Holyrood win in 2016 - albeit short of the unprecedented majority the party had won under Salmond in 2011 – and another in 2021.

In between those victories, she guided Scotland through the Covid pandemic, hosting daily briefings from the government's St Andrew's House headquarters.

Why did Nicola Sturgeon resign as first minister?

Ms Sturgeon announced she was standing down as first minister in February 2023, taking many in Scottish politics by surprise.

She said she had been struggling with conflicting emotions for months, and believed a new leader was needed who could "reach across the divide in Scottish politics".

She said she knew "in my head and in my heart" that it was the right time to step down for herself, her party and the country.

However, problems would quickly crop up both in her own life and for her party.

The SNP had become the focus of a Police Scotland investigation into its funding and finances.

In June 2023, Sturgeon was arrested and questioned by detectives, and later released. She insisted she had done nothing wrong, but the investigation remains live.

Murrell was also arrested and ultimately charged with embezzlement in April 2024.

Sturgeon announced in January this year that the two had been separated for some time, and had "decided to end" their marriage.

Meanwhile, the SNP struggled under her successor Humza Yousaf, who ended Sturgeon's governing pact with the Scottish Greens in 2024 – and saw his own leadership collapse days later.

The party went on to lose 39 seats in that year's general election, and is now seeking to rebuild ahead of the Holyrood election in 2026.

It is no surprise that Sturgeon has decided not to stand in the next election, but it will bring down the curtain on one of the Scottish Parliament's most storied careers.

What is her legacy?

During her years in power, Sturgeon drove through a host of policies, from a doubling of Scotland's free childcare allowance to the introduction of the baby box.

She has highlighted the introduction of the Scottish Child Payment as one of her main achievements in office, with a Scottish social security service established as well as a distinctive income tax system to fund it.

However, others fell short - notably her promise to close the attainment gap between school pupils from better off and more deprived backgrounds, something she once famously made her number one priority.

She also found herself mired in a controversial debate about gender reforms, which came to a head in a damaging row about Isla Bryson, a transgender rapist, who was initially placed in a women's prison.

Under Sturgeon's leadership, the Scottish Parliament had passed a bill to make it easier for people to change their legally-recognised sex, but it was blocked by the UK government.

Ms Sturgeon initially moved to challenge that in the courts, but the legal case was subsequently dropped by Mr Yousaf.

Sturgeon led her party to success at a number of elections

A number of her other latter-day policies have also been ditched, including plans for a National Care Service.

However, her biggest disappointment as first minister was her failure to progress the issue which brought her into politics in the first place.

Sturgeon pushed for a fresh referendum on Scottish independence on several occasions - most notably in the wake of the Brexit vote in 2016 - but each time she ran into a wall of opposition from the UK government.

While she had to deal with five prime ministers - in David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak - none of them were willing to sign up to a second referendum on independence, something she considered to be a democratic outrage.

An attempt to force the issue through the Supreme Court also failed, and left the SNP facing questions about exactly how it could progress the issue.

Sturgeon looks set to depart the stage in 2026 with those questions – which sparked her original interest in politics - still unanswered.