Wings Over Scotland | The Turning Point

We don’t have much to say about this graph that it doesn’t say for itself.

The arrest of Peter Murrell on 5 April 2023, just a couple of weeks after his wife realised the game was up and walked away before the cops came round and put a big blue tent up on their front garden, changed everything in Scottish politics.

There can’t have been many starker sliding-doors moments. Before the resignation there was a vast gulf between the SNP and their nearest challengers – fully 26 points in early December 2022, a fortnight before the SNP infamously steamrollered the Gender Recognition Reform Act through Parliament in a series of heated late-night sittings.

That began a slide, but after the resignation the lead collapsed entirely, and by the summer Labour were almost neck-and-neck with Humza Yousaf’s beleaguered administration, and duly almost wiped the SNP out of Westminster in July’s UK election.

Unfortunately for Labour, that led to Keir Starmer being Prime Minister and their support instantly fell off a cliff, leaving a gap into which mainly Reform but also the Greens surged. (We’ve left the Tories and Lib Dems out of the graph to keep it clean, as both of them barely moved during the period and are largely irrelevant forces.)

The Parliamentary arithmetic barely changed at the 2026 Holyrood election due to the electoral system giving the SNP a grossly disproportionate number of seats, but it’s plainly visible how much the wider political picture did. The SNP, which had only fleetingly dropped below 40% since the 2014 indyref and had peaked at 62% (a breathtaking 42 points ahead of Labour), has only momentarily brushed that line again.

As recently as two months before Sturgeon’s resignation (and for most of the preceding three years), the combined SNP and Green vote would have been enough to surpass the 50% mark in an election being used as a de-facto referendum. But the SNP did nothing, and this May that combined vote fell far short, with Unionist parties taking 60% of the ballot. When her husband was read his rights the window of opportunity closed, probably forever.

For those three years, Sturgeon knew that the Operation Branchform cat was out of the bag and that the clock was ticking. But she stalled and stalled until she ran out of time and the chance was gone. In terms of independence, the second half of that graph may as well be a flatline at zero.