We know Nicola Sturgeon will stand down next year. But don't write her off just yet | Libby Brooks

Nicola Sturgeon must be sick of the sight of her own obituaries. Since she confirmed on Wednesday that she will not seek re-election as a MSP at next May’s Holyrood elections, ending a 27-year career in frontline politics, the Scottish media has overflowed with assessments of the legacy and greatest hits of the country’s first female and longest serving first minister.

Although the decision came as no surprise, given her increasingly infrequent appearances at the Scottish parliament, her departure seems a good time to consider what she did and the imprint she has left on the recent history and future trajectory of her country.

Having reported on Sturgeon for over a decade, I remember the deafening roars of the crowd at Glasgow’s 12,000-seater Hydro arena, which she sold out in 2014 – like Lady Gaga and Beyoncé – a few weeks after her election as SNP leader. I remember a round table on energy policy, where she made sure that the only young woman in the room got a chance to speak. I remember her reddening face and wobbly lip last year as she struggled to contain her emotion under questioning at the UK Covid-19 inquiry.

An introvert with down-to-earth charm, she was – and still is among many in the SNP and the wider Scottish public – adored, a progressive ally and advocate in private as well as public. Her greatest gift is the ability to speak human when all around her just look to be touting for votes.

At the age of 54 – with eight years on our prime minister and still relatively young in terms of political careers – talk of legacy can feel premature. It is certainly fluid, with the Branchform inquiry into SNP finances, which saw her arrested a few months after she resigned as first minister in 2023, ongoing and her soon to be ex-husband, Peter Murrell, charged with alleged embezzlement.

Since her announcement, posted on her current favoured social media platform, Instagram, the Holyrood opposition has taken the opportunity to cast her legacy as one dominated by division and failure. But that is less than half the story.

Certainly Sturgeon benefited electorally from the Yes/No split that followed the 2014 referendum, with independence voters uniting behind the SNP, and supporters of the union split between other parties. It took another 10 years for the link between constitutional preference and ballot box to uncouple, resulting in the SNP’s catastrophic defeat in last July’s general election at the hands of a resurgent Scottish Labour. (Since then, Labour has squandered its advantage and the SNP is leading the polls for Holyrood again.)

But her own political standing suffered because of that same division – those who loved her were unwilling to hold her to account, while those who loathed her refused to acknowledge her many assets.

It was this capacity to polarise that Sturgeon herself identified as one of her reasons for stepping down as first minister. But it was plain that she was also spent after a gruelling run of challenges, including the Covid pandemic, the Holyrood inquiry into the Scottish government’s handling of sexual assault allegations against her predecessor Alex Salmond, and the controversy around her flagship gender recognition reforms.

Throughout the pandemic, Sturgeon was admired across the UK for her straightforward and reassuring communication, yet the UK Covid inquiry exposed a significant lack of transparency behind this, bypassing cabinet decision-making and mass deletion of informal messages. It underlined her hyper-controlled, presidential style of leadership and its brutal self-imposed toll, with Sturgeon unable to allow herself even a day off.

With the Salmond inquiry – as with her husband and former SNP chief executive Murrell – some felt a woman was being unfairly held responsible for the alleged actions of a man – but self-evidently this woman was also in charge of her government and at the epicentre of party decision-making for decades. Likewise, both she and Murrell failed to recognise the almighty potential conflict that having a married couple at the head of a governing party represented.

She was badly hurt by accusations of betraying feminism over her gender recognition reforms, which she could not have foreseen would coalesce around a global culture war when she first proposed them as a natural progression from the introduction of equal marriage. But her refusal to entertain those, even within her own party, worried about the potential scope of self-identification left her exposed.

Sturgeon herself has said the introduction of the Scottish child payment, the expansion of free childcare and support for youngsters in care are among her proudest achievements. Critics point to failures to tackle the attainment gap or drug deaths, timidity in taking on vested interests over NHS reform, and also her unwillingness to build on the broad coalition gifted by the Yes movement after the referendum.

Something that even admirers of Sturgeon have always wrestled with was the space between rhetoric and reality in the SNP government – or, as an anti-poverty campaigner said to me: “Does it matter that witches have been pardoned if you don’t know what you’re going to feed your child tomorrow?” Despite some excellent policy progress on violence against women and child poverty, for example, third sector leaders would highlight a significant implementation gap: like the extended childcare, which ended up a postcode lottery, with extra hours at work-unfriendly times.

Speaking to younger activists, it’s clear that the sheer symbolism of Sturgeon’s tenure inspired generations. Her legacy is as much in what she made visible and normal. She proved it was possible to govern in an entirely different tone of voice from the Tory bombast at Westminster: speaking out against Trump, happily describing herself as a feminist, championing the transformative power of reading. She spoke too about miscarriage, the menopause, fostering – and while having a political leader talk about those topics on Loose Women is not a silver bullet to systemic inequality, it mattered.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the first of her kind would end up unable to fulfil the weight of expectation. It is worth keeping in mind too that the party she led is united by its desire for independence, not centre-left social policy.

For now, Sturgeon’s Instagram followers can see her enjoying the “ordinary stuff that most people take for granted”, which she referenced in her resignation speech as having become increasingly out of her reach. Although for Sturgeon this involves hanging out with the tartan A-list, DJing with Hollywood star Alan Cumming and hosting books events with her old pal and crime-writing doyenne Val McDermid.

Meanwhile, those obituary writers – me included – await the publication of her “deeply personal” memoir later this year with some anticipation about the revelations it may contain. I doubt these will be the last words to be written about a woman who continues to fascinate, infuriate, inspire and challenge even as she steps – for now – out of the limelight.

• Libby Brooks writes on Scotland for the Guardian

• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.