Whether you loved her or loathed her, agreed with her politics or not, no one could say Nicola Sturgeon wasn’t a strong and charismatic leader.
And that will be her successor’s greatest problem. Because it is never easy to replace a strong leader.
LBJ wasn’t the man JFK was, Eden was no Churchill.
We have all experienced this personally.
When a person who was a family’s centre of gravity dies it damages family ties. Your relationship with brothers and sisters, aunts and cousins, changes.
The most difficult job in football is to fill the shoes of a trophy-winning manager. Think of the successors to Jim McLean at Dundee United and Alex Ferguson at Aberdeen.
And we see it in the workplace too, probably the closest ordinary people come to the world of politics.
In any job, what you did as a worker under the old boss might not be what the new boss wants. Blue-eyed favourites may find the golden light no longer shines upon them.
The qualities needed in any new leader – a boss, a football manager, or First Minister of Scotland – are easy to describe.
They must have a certainty of purpose, the ability to unite those around them . . . load any cliché you like on to the end of the list.
And the process of choosing of a successor is also prosaic. An election will select one candidate or another.
The difficult bit comes after that.
Challenges facing Nicola Sturgeon successor
Because the most crucial thing the new leader of the SNP will need is also very simple, but the most difficult to find.
It is time.
Time to establish themselves, time to find a voice of authority, time to display the much-sought-after “sure touch”.
I again say this neither as a supporter or detractor, but the Scottish Government has had troubles recently.
Even the most ardent supporter would have noticed they have been savagely criticised – rightly or wrongly – over gender reform, ferries, A9 dualling, and the bottle recycling scheme, to name just a few matters.
The First Minister stepping down cannot be seen as a positive either.
So the party is, unavoidably, damaged.
But, as with any workplace, family, football club or political party, when trying to make sense of all of this, the trick is to stand back and look at events in the long term.
We have grown to be very bad at this in the instant world of social media comment and 24-hour news coverage.
If any supporter of any party thinks the push for independence is over, they are a fool.
Equally, any SNP supporter who complacently thinks the movement will automatically heal itself and carry on as before is also wishing, rather than thinking.
We are entering a new phase of politics in Scotland. No one can predict what will happen other than to be sure that things will never be the same again.
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