So will new First Minister be ‘another Nicola’– or the bête noire of the Greens?
HUMZA Yousaf’s humiliating resignation is set to fire the starting gun on another SNP leadership contest, after the last one exposed the scale of divisions tearing the party apart. Here, our Scottish Political Editor assesses the runners and riders in the race to become the third First Minister in just over a year. JOHN SWINNEY, 60 ODDS – 4/9
HIS supporters see him as a ‘safe pair of hands’ who can steady the SNP ship after its most turbulent recent journey.
A veteran SNP figure, John Swinney’s days in high office appeared to be over when he announced his resignation as deputy first minister in March last year, just a fortnight after Nicola Sturgeon made her decision to stand down.
At the time, he said it had been the ‘privilege of my life’ to serve, having been in Cabinet since the SNP came to power in 2007. He claimed that it was time for ‘a new generation’ to take control of the party.
However, after viewing 13 months of chaos from the backbenches, he now appears to think a return to the old guard may be required.
While in London yesterday for an event marking 25 years of devolution, Mr Swinney said he would give ‘very careful consideration’ to standing for the leadership.
Some SNP establishment figures, such as deputy leader Keith Brown, Westminster leader Stephen Flynn, longest-serving MP Pete Wishart and a string of Cabinet ministers, were yesterday rallying round Mr Swinney and pleading for him to stand, because he is seen as the best candidate to unite the party and work with opponents at Holyrood, while attempting to ‘reset’ the SNP’s blundering approach.
However, some in the party believe he would just be another Nicola Sturgeon continuity candidate who would be unable to move on from the mistakes made under her leadership. Among them, popular Edinburgh South West MP Joanna Cherry insisted that ‘continuity won’t cut it’ and that the next leader ‘must deliver change’.
Mr Swinney will be weighing up whether to go ahead with a leadership bid, including his own personal family circumstances. He has spoken in the past of his wife Elizabeth Quigley’s battle against multiple sclerosis.
He will also need to decide whether another shot at the leadership is a good idea, given he still carries bruises from his last stint, when he stood down in 2004 after four years as leader following terrible election results for the party.
In his resignation speech at the time, he talked of the ‘turbulence’ in the SNP during his leadership and alluded to damage done by divisions between those who wanted a fast route to independence and gradualist devolutionists who preferred a slower approach.
When asked in 2014 if he would ever stand to be leader again, Mr Swinney said: ‘Unreservedly, absolutely, in no circumstances. There is no way of you configuring any signal I am possibly giving you, to say anything other than “no”.’
KATE FORBES, 34 ODDS – 7/2
DURING last year’s bitter leadership contest, the former finance secretary openly acknowledged growing concerns about the direction of the SNP under Ms Sturgeon when she repeatedly declared that ‘continuity won’t cut it’. She also had the foresight to highlight questions about Humza Yousaf’s competence during an infamous STV leadership exchange, telling him: ‘Well Humza, you’ve had a number of jobs in government. When you were transport minister the trains were never on time, when you were justice minister the police were strained to breaking point, and now as health minister we’ve got record high waiting times. What makes you think you can do a better job as First Minister?’
In the early stages of her campaign, she came up against the might of the SNP establishment who mostly backed Mr Yousaf and tried to derail her leadership bid by ruthlessly highlighting her Christian beliefs as a member of the Free Church of Scotland. When she admitted in the opening days of the campaign that she may have voted against same-sex marriage, she faced such a backlash from within the SNP that she nearly dropped out of the race.
But Ms Forbes staged a remarkable comeback and won widespread praise for her ability to win over new voters by offering an alternative viewpoint to the Sturgeon regime, focused on a probusiness, pro-economy message.
In the final round of voting, she won support from 48 per cent of SNP members, compared with 52 per cent who backed Mr Yousaf.
Despite running him so close, she was frozen out of his government and has been on the backbenches for 13 months. However,
Ms Forbes has never ruled out another leadership bid and has attempted to win over the more fundamentalist wing of the SNP with a regular column in the pro-independence newspaper The National.
Her supporters, including veteran backbencher Fergus Ewing, believe she is the strongest candidate because she can deliver change and set the party and country in a new direction.
But those on the Left of the SNP will remain resolutely opposed to Ms Forbes becoming party leader – and she would also be fiercely opposed by the Scottish Greens, putting the prospect of securing majority support among MSPs in doubt.
It remains unclear whether she will believe that this is the time to put her name forward again.
NEIL GRAY, 38 ODDS – 9/2
WHEN Humza Yousaf became First Minister, one of the key figures in the background had been his campaign manager Neil Gray.
The Airdrie and Shotts MSP was awarded the job of wellbeing economy secretary. A loyal servant of the First Minister, he was then trusted to take on the post of Health Secretary, one of the most senior roles in the Cabinet, when Michael Matheson stood down following the scandal over his £11,000 iPad data roaming bill.
Senior SNP figures attempted to set about succession planning from early in Mr Yousaf’s leadership and regarded Mr Gray, alongside fellow rising star Mairi McAllan, as likely contenders.
His performances in government – particularly in the economy role where he successfully managed to appeal to the business community – have impressed onlookers.
But Mr Yousaf’s brief reign may mean a leadership contest has come too soon for him. There are also doubts about whether someone so closely tied to a chaotic regime is right for the top job.
JENNY GILRUTH, 40 ODDS – 16/1
FORMER teacher Jenny Gilruth was given her first Cabinet job by Humza Yousaf when he appointed her as his Education Secretary after he became First Minister.
That promotion came despite some concern about her performance in her previous role as transport minister, at a time when ScotRail was nationalised.
In that role, which she had held since January 2022, Ms Gilruth was accused of breaching the ministerial code by delaying rail works in order to benefit her own constituents in Mid Fife and Glenrothes – only to be cleared of wrongdoing by Mr Yousaf.
Unlike some in the SNP, she is not tribal and is willing to work across parties. Indeed, she is married to the former Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale. But she yesterday offered her support to Mr Swinney and said she would back him to become SNP leader.
quest for independence had already run out of road.
At the same time, it was becoming clear that her government was making an unholy mess of the things that really mattered to Scots, like schools, hospitals and roads. No wonder she scuttled for the exit before the roof fell in, bequeathing Yousaf a weak hand which he proceeded to play badly.
Nobody should be surprised by this. Yousaf made a hash of everything he touched in government but, so shallow is the Holyrood gene pool, he could always count on being promoted to his next level of incompetence.
Like many an over-confident public school boy who never had a proper job outside politics, he seemed to think he could glide through life without being overburdened by homework or preparation.
He is by no means a bad man, or even nasty. But vanity and stupidity can be a fatal cocktail.
As transport minister he failed to deliver two ferries for poorly served Western islands which were meant to become operational on his watch. (Years late and tens of millions over budget they have still to start service.)
He made no progress in turning the A9, Scotland’s most dangerous road, into a dual carriageway. But he did become the first ever transport minister to be pulled over for driving without insurance.
As justice minister, he fathered the ludicrous hate crime legislation which has tarnished Scotland’s global reputation for free speech and became a national joke on implementation.
As health minister he left Scotland’s NHS in even worse shape than he found it, which was quite an achievement since he had taken over during the pandemic. The recent Covid inquiry hearings revealed a health minister out of his depth.
Despite far greater funding than the English NHS, barely one significant health target was met while he was in charge and now, for the first time, private healthcare is booming north of the Border.
A track record of failure like this should have disqualified him from becoming First Minister. But it didn’t. He had Sturgeon’s blessing, he was amiable, young and progressive. His sister had once dubbed him ‘Humza Useless’. He proceeded to live up to the nickname she gave him. ‘I will not trade my principles to stay in power,’ he said in his resignation statement yesterday. In fact, he has no principles. He merely mouthed fashionable progressive platitudes, which went unchallenged in the Left-wing echo chamber he inhabited.
It made him inclined to go along with every madcap scheme the SNP’s Green coalition partners proposed.
His political touch was tenuous. He pitched himself as ‘Continuity Sturgeon’ just as her reputation was being trashed.
He hitched himself to the gender selfidentification zealots, promoted by the Greens, even though they had already done much to undermine Sturgeon’s standing with a Scottish public which is much more socially conservative than its political elite. He bought into impossible cuts in climate emission standards by 2030, requiring the hugely unpopular removal of one million gas boilers.
He brought a slapstick, Keystone Cops element to the corridors of power. The SNP camper van seized by the police and the police tent erected on Sturgeon’s garden had already made Scotland something of a laughing stock but Yousaf did his bit to add to the gaiety of the nation: falling off his scooter in a Holyrood corridor, struggling with scissors as he tried to cut a ribbon at an office opening, bleating that he ‘didn’t mean...to make them [the Greens] angry’ when he terminated the SNP’s powersharing agreement.
His failure to see this and the fact he was bereft of a Plan B was what brought him down in the end and suggests he’s not really suited to politics.
There were times when he made even Liz Truss look competent. His departure leaves the SNP in tatters.
The two modern giants of Scottish Nationalism are much diminished. The SNP was in turmoil by the time Sturgeon stepped down, with membership in freefall and the police all over the party like a rash. Her husband, until recently the SNP chief executive, faces embezzlement charges, her hopes of becoming an elder stateswoman on the international stage now dashed.
When her predecessor and mentor Alex Salmond went on trial for various sexual assault charges, he was acquitted on all counts bar one ‘not proven’. But what we learned in that trial sullied his reputation irretrievably.
When it comes to its best-known faces, the SNP is not in a good place.
Then there’s its record after 17 years in power. With independence a distant pipe dream once more, that is all it has to fall back on. It is not much to boast about. Decline and decay have been the order of the day. By 1900, more than one in five of the world’s ships were being built on the Clyde. Now it can’t even manage two island ferries.
An education system, in which a kid like me from a council estate could get a worldclass education at a 16th century school (Paisley Grammar) and a 15th century university (Glasgow), is in sad decline. Scottish schools have plummeted down the international league tables.
The attainment gap – a measure of the difference between the performance of poor and affluent children – has widened so that for the first time in recorded history a poor English kid gets a better education than a poor Scottish kid.
And places at Scottish universities for Scots students are being cut (they pay no fees so the places have to be rationed), while overseas students – who pay full fees – are welcomed in ever larger numbers.
More fundamentally, the SNP has done nothing to reposition Scotland for success in the 21st century.
Its financial services have never really recovered from the Great Crash of 2008: famous names such as Bank of Scotland,
‘It leaves the SNP in tatters’
‘Vanity and stupidity can be a fatal cocktail’
Royal Bank and Standard Life are either no more or a shadow of their former selves.
North Sea oil, on which the SNP once said it could build a prosperous independent Scotland, is in decline – and the party now wants to phase it out altogether.
Glasgow is mired in urban squalor once more, its sanitation workers fearful of being bitten by rats. Even affluent Edinburgh is fraying at the edges. World-famous Princes Street is a disgrace.
Yousaf’s political career has ended and the SNP dream of separation has ended in a rude awakening. The United Kingdom will remain intact. This is to be celebrated.
But much damage has been inflicted on Scotland. Those responsible for the vandalism will soon be gone. But who will put it right is uncertain.
The Tories won’t be given the chance and, on many policies, Scottish Labour is too often just SNP-lite.
A Scottish renaissance would be the best way to bury separatism for ever. It remains, alas, some way off.