IF YOU THINK YOU CAN BULLY ME OUT OF OFFICE, YOU ARE MISTAKEN

"If you think you can bully me out of office, you are mistaken and you misjudge me," Nicola Sturgeon comes out swinging.

Karate pose: Ms Sturgeon was in combat mode this afternoon

Nicola Sturgeon has brushed aside a vote of no confidence tabled by the Tories, after a committee of opposition MSPs had teed them up earlier today.

A total of 31 MSPs backed the motion, with 65 voting against. There were 27 abstentions, mostly from the Scottish Labour Party.

The Scottish Conservatives tabled it, but the move was always doomed to fail after the Scottish Greens said they would not support such a vote.

In that the Tories always knew this would fail begs the question, why do it? And the answer is, for publicity reasons, obviously. We are just about to move into the campaign period to elect a new parliament in May, and they want to damage the First Minister as much as they can before voters go to the polls.

The findings by the committee of opposition MSPs are separate from those of the independent adjudicator James Hamilton QC, who reported just last night that there had been no breach of the ministerial code by the First Minister, in any of her dealings in relation to the inquiry.

Speaking during the debate, Ms Sturgeon said she would have quit if she had been judged to have broken the code.

"Had Mr Hamilton's report gone the other way, I would have accepted it, had he found that I had breached the code in anything other than the most technical and immaterial of ways, I would have been standing here right now tendering my resignation," she said.

"The integrity of the office I am so privileged to hold really does matter to me.

"The office of First Minister is more important than any temporary incumbent of it."

And in a message for the Scottish Tories, she told them: "If you think you can bully me out of office, you're mistaken, and you misjudge me.

"If you want to remove me as first minister, try and do it in an election." She continued: "If today's desperate stunt proves anything, it's that you have no confidence whatsoever in your ability to do so, because you have nothing positive to offer the Scottish people."

Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, said Ms Sturgeon should have done the "honourable" thing and stood down after being found to have misled parliament.

"After all that evidence-gathering and deliberation, the committee found that Nicola Sturgeon misled this parliament, nothing can erase that fact, however inconvenient it is to the first minister and her supporters," she said.

"And let's remember, that by misleading this Scottish parliament, she misled the people of Scotland too."

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar took aim at both the Tories and the SNP, telling MSPs: "We cannot support a motion which is designed, not to deliver the kind of strong opposition that they (the Tories) promised, but is devised purely to divide our country and our politics.

The Scottish Labour leader continued to lay into the Tories, calling them out for "playing games".

He said: "The Conservatives have shown themselves as only interested in removing Nicola Sturgeon from office, rather than the facts of this terrible series of events. They have also sought to undermine the integrity of the independent investigator."

But perhaps the harshest criticism of the Tories and the Labour and Lib Dem members of the committee came from the co-convener of the Scottish Greens, Patrick Harvie, who said: 

“If the First Minister had been found guilty by the Hamilton report of breaching the code of conduct, I would be calling on her to consider her position and to take the responsibility that someone in her position should show.

“So I similarly call on all members now to call on those who have breached the rules of our parliament by leaking committee evidence and conclusions. They need to take responsibility, they need to consider their positions, they should not be candidates for re-election in six weeks’ time.”

He added: “Trust has been damaged in the process and that needs to be restored. We fundamentally need to see some responsibility from the MSPs who have treated this process with such contempt.”