It was fitting that Nicola Sturgeon should bow out of the Scottish Parliament with a speech on the Promise – promise was something her leadership seemed, initially, to offer by the bucketload: the promise of hope, equality and a new kind of politics rooted in wellbeing and social justice.

Having come to power on the back of a referendum that was, by its very nature, divisive, it would be naive to suggest she wasn’t tribal.

But she was capable of reaching across the chamber on issues that mattered to her, particularly those involving equal representation.

The sight of her collaborating with the then Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale on initiatives such the Women 50:50 campaign was reassuring to those of us who continue to crave the cross-party collaboration the Parliament was designed to foster.

That all seems a long time ago now. The decade that followed the SNP’s astonishing 2015 general election rout was riven with feuding, internal and external – a centralism which stifled creative thinking, and a lack of transparency which fostered suspicion about what was going on behind closed doors.

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But what really undermined the party’s potential was its tendency to get high on its own ideals. It was easy, as a voter, to get swept away on the vision it offered of a better, more enlightened society; harder to accept it had no route map to achieve it.

Sturgeon was good at proselytising those values centre-left liberals hold dear – inclusion, empathy, compassion – yet often seemed unable to grasp that delivering on them required the opposite: a cool head, tough decisions, rigorously thought-through legislation.

Time and time again we saw well-intended initiatives – think........

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