NICOLA Sturgeon has revealed she felt close to being "broken" at the height of the row with Alex Salmond.

The First Minister described her feelings over the feud with her predecessor in an interview with the leading current affairs and cultural magazine in the United States, the New Yorker.

"The past year has accentuated Sturgeon’s leadership qualities," the feature by the periodical's London-based journalist Sam Knight reported.

"But it has also been politically traumatic. In 2018, Salmond, her predecessor and mentor, was accused of sexually harassing staff while he was in office. An investigation by Sturgeon’s government into the allegations was mishandled, and a subsequent criminal prosecution, in which Salmond was tried for attempted rape, ended in his acquittal."

It added: "The scandal ruined one of the most important relationships of Sturgeon’s life and came close to removing her from office. Earlier this year, two separate inquiries into the Salmond case explored whether Sturgeon had lied to the Scottish Parliament.

"She narrowly survived. 'I think my political opponents—I don’t know, maybe Alex himself ... There was an element of ‘We can break her,’ you know? Almost kind of personally as well as politically. That was how it felt,' Sturgeon told me. 'And, you know, there were days when they might have come closer than they knew. But they didn’t.'"

The article, published today, profiles the First Minister ahead of the Holyrood election on Thursday focusing on the independence goal, and how it has been provided by fresh impetus by Brexit, Scotland's vote to remain in the EU and by Sturgeon's handling of the pandemic.

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Salmond, Andrew Wilson, the former MSP and author of the SNP's Growth Commission, former health secretary Shona Robison and former first minister Lord McConnell are among the people interviewed.

Discussing his feud with Sturgeon and the Holyrood inquiry into his successful legal fight with her government, Salmond told the magazine: “If I wanted to destroy her, that could have been done.”

Salmond, who now leads the Alba Party, also attacked Sturgeon for failing to advance the case for independence since he left office ion the wake of the No result of 2014. 

He said: “The problem that Nicola has, and it is one entirely of her own making, is that the case for independence hasn’t advanced one iota since 2014.”

Discussing independence the article underlined that the SNP stress the potential of Scotland as a small European nation.

"The SNP sees an independent Scotland taking its rightful place alongside other small states, such as Ireland, Denmark, and Finland, secure within the broader architecture of the EU," it said.

"Sturgeon embodies an apparent oxymoron: a left-of-center nationalist. The SNP is explicitly pro-immigration—it wants Scotland’s population to increase—and attentive to the rights of children, refugees, and trans people.

"Since the mid-nineties, the SNP has tacked carefully to the left of Labour, opposing the Iraq War, in 2003, and displacing the Party from its historic dominance north of the English border.

"Scotland’s government controls about sixty per cent of spending in the country—the rest is overseen by London—and the SNP has made the country’s tax code more progressive while also funding free university tuition and personal care for the elderly, and reducing the voting age to sixteen."

It added: "Sturgeon implores Scots 'to work as if we are indeed living in the early days of a better nation,' a quote attributed to the Canadian poet Dennis Lee, but she complains that she must govern with one hand behind her back.

"Sturgeon would like to introduce a universal basic income, and wants Scotland to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2045, five years ahead of the rest of the U.K.

"She invites comparisons to other female leaders of beautiful, small, forward-thinking countries, such as Jacinda Ardern, of New Zealand, and Katrín Jakobsdóttir, of Iceland. Sturgeon has described Birgitte Nyborg, the fictional Prime Minister of Denmark in the TV show “Borgen,” as her favorite onscreen politician. In 2019, she gave a TED talk about the importance of placing measures of a country’s well-being ahead of its GDP."

The feature continued: "At the same time, she is an absolutist, who yearns to break apart one of the world’s oldest and most successful democracies. 'I think she is profoundly impressive,' the former [Tory] Cabinet minister said. 'But she is bad. . . . In the end, there is nothing that matters for her other than this dream of creating an independent Scotland, which, remember—if she won by one vote, she would prefer to split the country irrevocably.'"

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The report said Brexit had consolidated support for a Scottish independence referendum, but also complicating the matter too factor as the UK has now left both the EU single market and its customs union.

"As a result, new customs and border checks are conducted on most goods traded with Europe. If Scotland becomes independent, it will have to choose between borderless trade with the rest of the UK to which it exports around sixty billion pounds’ worth of goods a year, and joining the EU's single market, to which it exports a quarter of that amount.

"In February, the London School of Economics calculated that, in trade terms, leaving the U.K. would be two or three times as damaging to Scotland’s economy as Brexit has been.

"Sturgeon avoids the dilemma of an economic border with England, which has not existed for three centuries, by insisting that she doesn’t want one."