Kenny Farquharson - how bad was she?

WENDY has been Wendied. The woman with the best mind in Scottish politics has been forced to resign because of a failure of concentration, compounded by a failure of judgment, prolonged by a failure to understand that the game was well and truly up.

Alexander's friends are spending this weekend blaming all and sundry for her demise – the press, the parliamentary authorities, the standards commissioner, the SNP. Yet, ultimately Alexander, has no one to blame but herself.

Let's put aside, for a moment, the circumstances that led to her downfall, which are examined in depth elsewhere in this newspaper. When we look instead to the future it's clear we have reached a watershed moment in Scottish history. The decisions taken by the Labour Party in the coming days, weeks and months will have far-reaching effects on the Scottish political landscape and the shape of Scotland's constitutional future.

Cards on the table: Wendy Alexander was right to resign. Yet her demise is a terrible setback for Scotland. This might be considered a curious conclusion, given the near-unanimous verdict that her leadership has been a cack-handed disaster. But the direction Alexander was taking the Scottish Labour Party was the right one. Not just for the party itself, but for Scottish politics as a whole.

In many ways, of course, history's judgment on Alexander will be unkind. She will be remembered as the woman who bottled a contest with Jack McConnell for the Scottish Labour leadership in 2001, and who made a dog's breakfast of it when handed the job on a plate in 2007. But I suspect history may have something more to say: that she was the woman who, having played a key role in bringing about home rule in 1997, realised after a decade that the pact with the Scottish people needed renewed. Furthermore, her blueprint for taking Scotland into its next political era was more far-sighted and better thought-through than anyone else's at the time.

So what was this blueprint? And what will now happen to it as Scottish Labour ponders the choice of a new leader and a possible change in strategy? Alexander has left three legacies in her short time as a Scottish political leader, and the fate of each of these three legacies will have a profound effect in determining this country's future. It's worth examining each of them for clues as to what may be in store.

The first legacy is Labour's recent conversion to the cause of more powers for the Scottish Parliament. The party fought last year's Holyrood elections saying more powers were completely unnecessary – a foolish stance, ordered by Gordon Brown, that could have been the difference between winning and losing. When Alexander was elected leader, the first thing she did was to ditch this and embrace the view that it was time devolution moved on, and took on more responsibility.

To the dismay of some Labour colleagues she decided to find common cause with the Tories and Lib Dems and create a cross-party group to examine ways of giving Holyrood enhanced powers, while staying within the UK. And so the Calman Commission was born, headed by former chief medical officer, Sir Kenneth Calman. This was despite carping from indolent Labour MPs at Westminster (who are still resentful that MSPs, and not MPs, get all the attention from the Scottish electorate nowadays).

So, after yesterday's bombshell, what now for Labour's commitment to more powers for Holyrood? Even the most devo-sceptic new leader would struggle to ditch the Calman Commission, given that it already has Gordon Brown's public blessing. But both leading contenders to replace Alexander, Andy Kerr and Iain Gray, are thought to be less convinced of the logic of taking on Alex Salmond at his own game. Without Alexander as a spur, and without her commitment to new powers over the financial levers of the Scottish economy, Calman's eventual prescription risks being far less radical and far-reaching than it might have been. For those of us who believe in a much more powerful Scottish Parliament within the Union, that is a terrible shame.

The second Alexander legacy is her now-infamous decision to throw Labour's weight behind a referendum on Scottish independence. Her unveiling of this policy in May this year was comically clumsy. But seldom has a ground-breaking political strategy been so misrepresented and poorly understood.

In a nutshell, her thinking was this: she wanted more powers for the Parliament. But she knew this option couldn't be put to the people in a referendum without also giving them the option of full independence. What Scotland was heading towards, therefore, was a multi-option referendum on the country's future. She realised, however, that this was likely to be a disaster – how could you possibly decide a nation's fate on the basis of reallocated second preferences in a voting system that few people understood? The result of any such referendum would lack legitimacy. She therefore decided the only option was to give people the choice of a straight "yes" or "no" on independence. Only when that question had been settled – in her belief, in favour of a reformed Union – could Scotland move on and develop home rule within the UK. If Scotland said 'yes' to independence, then fair enough – who could argue against the verdict of the Scottish people?

Officially this still remains Scottish Labour policy – albeit now with the proviso that Labour's backing is provisional on what is in the actual referendum question. But it is an open secret that Labour is deeply divided about the wisdom of risking the integrity of the United Kingdom in this way. For many senior Labour figures, Alexander's resignation is the perfect opportunity to ditch the referendum pledge for good.

Any candidate who tries to backtrack on this, however, has some serious questions to answer. How do they intend to get public endorsement of any new changes to the way Scotland is governed? Do they really believe a multi-option referendum is credible? And how can you oppose an independence referendum without giving the impression that you don't trust the Scottish people to decide their own future? Alexander took the bold step of saying to the Scottish public: "I trust you. You decide." It will be a brave politician that reneges on that one.

Which brings us to Wendy Alexander's third legacy, which is this: she had the courage to consider Scottish Labour's future after Gordon Brown. She appreciated that her first loyalty was to Scottish Labour, not to a UK Labour leader in London. This she considered to be true regardless of who that UK Labour leader might be, even if he was a long-standing friend and Prime Minister. This was an historic break from the past. It explains why, when Brown rejected her referendum strategy she ignored him and went public anyway. Why should Middle England have a veto on what's best for Scotland?

With Brown heading for defeat at a UK general election, does it not make eminent sense for Scottish Labour to keep its distance from him? Does the Scottish Labour leader really have to throw him/herself on the pyre? Looking further ahead, is it really acceptable to have a Scottish Labour leader in government at Holyrood who is beholden to a UK Labour leader who is only in opposition at Westminster?

The logical consequence of this thinking has to be greater autonomy – perhaps complete autonomy – for the Scottish Labour Party. This should be an issue in any coming leadership contest. Unless, of course, it turns out to be a stitch-up cynically arranged by Brown as he tries to reassert his authority over the Scottish party.

Brown's track record here is not encouraging. After Donald Dewar's death he blocked Jack McConnell's ambitions and engineered the election of Henry McLeish. After McLeish's ignominious resignation Brown backed Alexander against McConnell, only for her to pull out after a crisis of confidence. The man just can't help himself.

It was intriguing, in the aftermath of the referendum internecine row, that Alexander quietly distanced herself from her presumed mentor. They were both children of the manse, she admitted, both viewed as policy "wonks", and both very "new" Scottish Labour, she admitted – but no one should assume she was in the Prime Minister's pocket. It didn't really wash, if nothing else because it was Brown's patronage that won her the job of Scottish leader unopposed.

The runners and riders are already being assessed, but a key question for every candidate this time around will be this: are you Gordon Brown's poodle? If Brown doesn't like the look of any of the possible options on the Labour benches at Holyrood then he might be tempted to parachute someone in from outside. By a curious quirk of coincidence, a Scottish Parliamentary by-election may soon arise in Motherwell & Wishaw caused by the expected resignation of McConnell to become British High Commissioner in Malawi. Now that would be a juicy political irony – McConnell inadvertently providing Brown with the means to fix a Scottish Labour leadership contest.

Will there be a candidate offering the same vision as Wendy Alexander? What are the chances of someone with the same radical blueprint for Scottish Labour and Scotland as a whole? I'm not sure there's an obvious candidate with the courage and conviction to pick up the torch. I hope I'm proved wrong, but if I'm right then Saturday, June 28, was a desperately bad day for Scotland.

Yesterday's resignation provides Labour with the opportunity for a clean break and a new start. But there will be those who want to use it to reinforce old loyalties and put Scottish Labour on a tighter leash. It remains to be seen whether Labour is capable of finally coming to terms with the reality that Scotland has a popular SNP First Minister and that voters show no sign of regretting last May's result and begging Labour to come back into power. For the foreseeable future the Nationalists are making the political weather, and Labour needs a response that doesn't sound like the same-old, same-old.

While we're looking to the future, what now for Wendy? Well, she's the mother of toddler twins, so she won't be short of things to do. Undoubtedly she could walk into a senior job at one of Scotland's big financial institutions or a management consultancy. Or she could follow her husband Brian Ashcroft into academia. With a restless and inquisitive mind, at the age of just 45, there's no doubt she still has a substantial contribution to make.

I, for one hope, it isn't long before she starts making her mark on Scottish politics once again, and doing what she does best: thinking the unthinkable.

Wendy's words and woes

After graduating from Glasgow University, Alexander became a researcher for George Galloway, then a Labour MP. He has claimed the first time Alexander saw a mobile phone she asked: "Where do you put the money in?"

• From 1999 to 2002 she was a minister in the Scottish Executive, first as Minister for Communities, then Minister for Enterprise and Lifelong Learning, and as Minister for Enterprise, Transport and Lifelong Learning. She said: "I'm not going to lose sight of the fact that I'm here to change the world."

• In 2000, she announced her plan to scrap Section 2A laws restricting the "promotion" of homosexuality by local authorities and faced accusations that the change would "promote gay sex teaching" in schools.

• After Labour's defeat in the 2007 Holyrood elections, Jack McConnell, inset, stood down as leader and Alexander stood for the party's top job. At the launch of her campaign, she said: "Much has changed in my life since 1999. I'm now married and have two wonderful children. My life has changed and so has Scotland."

• On September 15, she was officially confirmed as Labour leader. She said on the day: "The SNP honeymoon seems over."

• In November 2007, It emerged that Alexander's campaign had received a donation of just under £1,000 from a tax exile in the Channel Islands.

• In an interview at the Scottish Labour Party conference on March 28 this year, Wendy Alexander was asked for a rating of her performance thus far as Leader of the Scottish Labour Party. She said: "Ten out of 10."

• In April, she stunned the chamber at Holyrood by declining to use all her allocated questions at First Minister's Question Time, instead sitting down and saying that she had asked what she needed. "I have no more questions," she said.

• In May, she shocked many in her party by urging the Nationalists to hold a snap independence referendum. Labour had previously long opposed such a vote. Prime Minister Gordon Brown conspicuously failed to support her publicly, although Alexander insisted she had his support.

"Bring it on," she said.