Nicola Sturgeon will step down as Scotland's first minister after over eight years in the job. She has resigned without achieving the one overriding ambition which first sparked her interest in politics as a teenager - Scottish independence. She has been a central figure in Scottish and UK politics and Scotland's longest serving first minister. Her departure comes after a rocky period for her party. Reform of gender recognition laws caused controversy inside and outside the SNP. There are tensions over how to secure a second independence referendum. She said she had been ‘wrestling’ with the question of her future for some weeks as ‘the nature and form of modern political discourse means there is much greater intensity, brutality, to life as a politician than in years gone by’. One of her friends said, ‘She's had enough’.