Nicola Sturgeon has admitted she regrets the way her sudden resignation as leader of the SNP impacted her party.
The former first minister stood down in February 2023, fearing she had become a "polarising" figure in UK politics, which she thought would stand in the way of her party's ambitions.
The 54-year-old was arrested four months later as part of Operation Branchform, the investigation into the SNP's accounts. Her estranged husband Peter Murrell was charged with embezzlement of party funds in April last year.
Ms Sturgeon told interviewers from the Institute for Government (IfG) think tank that she had hoped her departure from the party would allow the SNP government to "reset."
She said: “I had become a polarising figure. I think it turns out I was wrong about this, but I convinced myself that if I took myself out somebody else would be able to reset things. Obviously that didn’t happen and hasn’t happened.”
After her resignation, Humza Yousaf took over as first minister and SNP leader and at the time, Sturgeon said she "could not be prouder" to have him succeed her.
However, she has now called Mr Yousaf’s decision to end the SNP’s power-sharing deal with the Scottish Greens "catastrophic."
Ms Sturgeon told the think tank: “I think crashing that agreement was catastrophic and, politics aside, totally the wrong thing to do for stable government.”
The former first minister also told the think tank her handling of the pandemic was what pushed her to quit, describing it as having taken a toll “physically and mentally”.
She said: “I had lost my appetite for the cut and thrust of politics a little bit. You can say politics can be too cut and thrust sometimes — and sometimes it is — but as a political leader you need to have that. You can’t survive in the jungle of politics without it and I had definitely lost it through the experience of Covid.”