Giving her views on the recent Holyrood election, Sturgeon wrote there was “a lack of vision or big picture thinking” when it came the SNP’s campaign.
She went on to say that while the outcome was “an outstanding result” for the party after 19 years in government, there were lessons to be learned.
In her view, the SNP was lucky the Scottish Greens did not stand in more constituencies, suggesting that had they done so, they could have eaten into John Swinney’s 58-seat tally.
It was the Greens, Sturgeon said, who’d come closest to “injecting a sense of hope for the future” into the campaign.
In what could be seen as a nod to issues like trans rights and climate change, she said the party had the courage to stand up for what it believed in.
And she added it would be a “massive electoral blunder” for the SNP to “soften” its left-of-centre environmentalist credentials, a reference perhaps to the party’s shifting position on oil and gas.
Of course, Sturgeon would be well aware of the headlines such comments would generate, and some have suggested she’s simply attempting to garner more publicity.
But her intervention has provoked a bit of a backlash among former colleagues and has raised some questions around the current first minister’s approach going forward.
