Frankly, Sturgeon's book is a chronicle of failure in which she tries to bury a man who is already dead

HISTORY isn't just written by winners, sometime losers get the pen too.

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Nicola Sturgeon has started rewriting history to obscure the part she played in dismantling the nationalist movement. It in itself is a chronicle of failure.

The former first minister's unreliable memoir, and the current Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes's decision to stand down, have taught us much about the post-Salmond SNP in recent weeks. I warn you, it is ugly reading.

For a start, I suspect that Ms Forbes is the kind of person that if a camper van unexpectedly turned up at her mother-in-law's might have the wit and curiosity to question where it had come from.

That clearly makes her unfit to lead the modern SNP. It appears not to be the Sturgeon way.

Forbes is as popular with her Cabinet colleagues as a fart in a space suit. That's not because of her so-called "socially conservative views".

Firstly, she is that clear her religious beliefs are her own and won't dictate public policy and secondly, her Free Church of Scotland views are little different from those of an imam, rabbi or priest whose opinions her colleagues would never wish to offend, particularly less than a year from an election.

Her heresy is that when running for the leadership, she was honest about the failures of the Sturgeon regime from the health service to education, justice to the economy.

Her crime is she insists on being her own woman. None of her Cabinet critics can claim to be even trying to be that. Nor can Nicola Sturgeon, as her memoirs reveal.

Sturgeon's political career was a creation of Alex Salmond, just as the destruction of his was her handiwork.