Nicola Sturgeon is obsessed with her step count, she says, raising her wrist and tapping a red-banded Fitbit. During this strange, half-physical, half- digital Holyrood election campaign, which by necessity involved less dashing round the country than usual and more sitting in front of a Zoom screen, the device has kept her “on just the right side of fitness”. A previous effort to contract a jogging habit, which involved afternoon sessions around Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh dressed in first-ministerial Lycra, was short-lived. “Who knows, I might get back to it,” she says, in a tone that makes clear that this is extremely unlikely.
From a run to a walk – a neat metaphor to sum up the past 12 months or so for the SNP. In fact, there was a period in the second half of last year where things threatened to break into a sprint. For 20 consecutive polls support for Scottish independence was above 50 per cent, reaching as high as 58 per cent – close to the fabled 60 per cent thought to be Sturgeon’s favoured jumping-off point for a second referendum. Post-Brexit, mid-pandemic and pre-election, it seemed that Scots were picking up speed towards a post-Britain future.
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