Return of the veteran loser Their failure to protect women and girls has cost SNP two leaders. Will the next one actually listen?
As men in grey kilts try to anoint John Swinney as leader for a second time...
WHEN John Swinney learned that the axe had fallen on Humza Yousaf’s political career, he took to social media with typical restraint. ‘I am terribly sorry that the First Minister has decided to step down,’ the party veteran tweeted. ‘Humza Yousaf has been a pioneer, the first person of colour to hold office as First Minister.’ As factually accurate as it was diplomatically brief, this understated eulogy from a politician never noted for his sparkling oratory did its best to skirt the wreckage of the Humza administration in search of some sliver of positivity.
Arguably, the true kindness lies in what he didn’t say – a generosity which may stem from the fact that Mr Swinney shares a deep understanding of the pain of political failure.
For all his long years as the great survivor of the Nationalist cause, marking 25 years as an MSP this year, Mr Swinney knows only too well what it feels like to be ousted as party leader after seeing public and political support melt away on his watch.
Between 2000 and 2004, he presided over two failed election campaigns when his party’s fortunes flatlined.
Prior to his leadership bid, Mr Swinney had proposed a 1p levy – dubbed ‘a penny for Scotland’ – to raise £230million to be earmarked for health, education and housing. In a humiliating backtrack as leader, he had to ditch the flagship Tartan Tax policy three years later in an effort to make the SNP more electable. ‘Weak leadership and economic illiteracy’ was how the dominant Labour Party described it.
The SNP’s time was coming – just not under
John Swinney. Instead, he stepped down and reinvented himself as the dependable righthand man to the two leaders, Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon, who would transform the party into an election-winning machine.
He became Honest John, the wise counsel, the safe pair of hands, the one to turn things round in a crisis. Little wonder then that, faced with the biggest crisis in their history, Honest John is now at the centre of an audacious bid by senior party figures to salvage the SNP’s tattered reputation from the ruins of the coalition of chaos.
He stepped down last year as deputy first minister following the abrupt departure of Ms Sturgeon and seemed then to be at peace with the thought his political career might be winding down.
But his supporters now hope that he can prove a unifying candidate who might lead the party through to the 2026 Scottish elections at least. Cabinet ministers including Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth, who was considering running to replace Mr Yousaf, have already urged Mr Swinney to run.
Some within the party suspect the move is partly an attempt to deprive the highly divisive former finance secretary and Highland MSP Kate Forbes of the top job.
Her socially conservative views are anathema to the party establishment and would render any rapprochement with the Scottish Greens almost impossible – and she would come under intense pressure not to throw her hat in the ring if Mr Swinney did.
The pair have scarcely seen eyeto-eye since Mr Swinney’s intemperate intervention during last year’s leadership contest, when he questioned her religious beliefs and suggested she should not be SNP leader if she would not back gay marriage. Yet Mr Swinney is not without baggage of his own.
As Ms Sturgeon’s deputy and Mr Salmond’s wingman, he represents the past. If Mr Yousaf was the continuity candidate last time round, then Mr Swinney is continuity squared. It hardly suggests the coming man that the party surely craves.
As one source put it: ‘The party would probably rally behind him if they wanted to make sure Kate Forbes did not get in.
‘He might be able to mend things with the Greens because they on the whole think the issue was with Humza and his resignation might draw a line under that.
‘However, he is not someone who could bridge the gap with the rebellious Right of his party.
‘He was, after all, the one who negotiated the Bute House Agreement that many see as having dragged the party down.’
Mr Swinney may offer more experience than other front-runners such as Mairi McAllan, but that experience is coloured in some eyes by his association with the party’s old guard.
He was the man to whom Ms Sturgeon handed the education brief in 2016 after she told the electorate to judge her on that department’s work, and the lieutenant she entrusted with Scotland’s Covid recovery in 2021.
Under him, however, educational performance slipped its moorings and Scotland tumbled down the international PISA rankings. The attainment gap remained a chasm – and that was before Covid struck and a cobbled-together and deeply unfair assessment system replaced the exam diet.
Bright pupils were penalised because, historically, their schools had performed more poorly in exams than others. Two votes of no confidence followed and both times Mr Swinney kept his job by single-figure margins.
Mr Swinney was also behind the controversial plan to appoint a named person to safeguard the welfare of every child in the country. Branded a ‘snooper’s charter’ by opponents, the legislation was delayed when the Supreme Court ruled that part of the plan breached human rights laws. In a humiliating U-turn, Mr Swinney later scrapped it.
He then faced a bruising inquisition at the recent UK Covid Inquiry, where it emerged that a mass cull of WhatsApp messages at the highest levels of government meant private exchanges between him and Ms Sturgeon were lost, depriving the inquiry of a potential treasure trove of invaluable information.
The inquiry uncovered another scandal: the so-called Gold Command meetings of a small, elite group of ministers made important decisions on how to handle the pandemic, which were never recorded in official minutes.
Even worse, Mr Swinney admitted that the decision to close all of Scotland’s schools at the start of the pandemic was taken only by him and Ms Sturgeon and not by the full Cabinet.
The revelations seemed at odds with the mild-mannered mien of a small-town bank manager, but then Mr Swinney has always been a political animal at heart.
Now 60, he joined the SNP aged just 15 after becoming convinced Scotland was getting a raw deal as part of the Union.
One example of it, he claimed years later, was the way sports commentators called swimmer David Wilkie a British success when he won his races and Scot
‘His supporters hope he can prove a unifying candidate’ ‘The mien of a small-town bank manager’
tish when he lost them. ‘I felt irritated,’ he said, and the seed of nationalism grew.
After his politics degree at Edinburgh University he became a research officer with the Scottish Coal Project and, by 1988, was a business and management consultant with a Glasgow firm called Development Options, where he met his first wife Lorna.
He later worked for Scottish Amicable as a strategic planning principal, remaining in post until he became an MP in 1997.
The following year, his marriage foundered after his wife had an affair and they divorced. Within a couple of years, he had a new role as an MSP and a new love when he started dating BBC politics reporter Elizabeth Quigley. She moved to a general news brief to avoid any suggestion of bias and the pair married in 2003.
By then, he had been leader of the party for three years and, in 2010, their son Matthew was born.
Having a child was a huge decision for them as Ms Quigley had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis ten years earlier.
In their 21st year of married life they remain every inch the devoted couple. Indeed, this time last year, Mr Swinney may well have been contemplating winding down a bit and enjoying a bit more family time. As an emotional Mr Yousaf made clear, the top job had taken a significant toll on his family in just a single year.
Now, as Mr Yousaf and his predecessor sit warming the backbenches, the SNP’s nearly man could finally be about to claim the big prize.
FIRST Nicola Sturgeon. Now Humza Yousaf. At what point are the SNP going to wake up and smell the virtue signalling? Because it is clear to me that there is one core issue that has brought down both First Ministers: the failure to protect women and girls in the face of an obsession with gender politics.
Both FMs hitched their wagon to it, and both were so burned by it that they ultimately lost their jobs. And yet whoever replaces Yousaf will, thanks to the manipulative power of the Greens, find themselves in exactly the same position as their predecessors.
Most Scots, I think, are utterly baffled as to how and why the country’s entire political system has become so entangled in a minority issue that affects so few members of the population.
Most of us – worried about our jobs and the cost of living, the state of the NHS and our schools – simply cannot understand why the SNP has become so captivated by identity politics.
And yet Sturgeon – thanks in no small part to pressure from Patrick Harvie, a man who in recent weeks has refused to accept the scientific validity of Dr Hilary Cass’s review on gender services to young people – was clearly entranced by the issue. It would most certainly have been on the table when the Bute House Agreement was made, back in the heady days of August 2021, when she talked about a ‘groundbreaking’ coalition capable of meeting the ‘challenges and opportunities’ of the age.
LISTENING to her new friends in the Greens, Sturgeon insisted on pushing through her wrongheaded Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which would have jeopardised the rights of women and girls by allowing biological males into female spaces and handed out gender recognition certificates to anyone who asked after three months, and to 16-year-olds after six.
This despite vocal protests from thousands of women who were concerned about their own safety, who camped outside Holyrood to protest, who begged their female First Minister to consider their words.
Sturgeon’s response? She called anyone who objected to the notion of self-ID ‘deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly racist’. By early 2023, Sturgeon had arguably become the politician in Britain most closely associated with the concept of gender self-ID.
It was to be her undoing. Soon after, as the voices of women across Scotland who felt pushed to the side and ignored swelled to a chorus, Sturgeon found herself in hot water over the case of Isla Bryson, a double rapist being housed in the female prison estate. It was the ultimate test case for a piece of rushed-through legislation where nobody had done their homework.
Former SNP deputy leader Jim Sillars referred to the issue as ‘Sturgeon’s poll tax’ while JK Rowling described her as a ‘destroyer of women’s rights’.
Just days after being repeatedly asked in a news conference and in the Scottish parliament whether she believed Bryson was a woman, leading to tetchy exchanges with journalists and fellow politicians alike, Sturgeon had gone. Falling on her sword, teary yet not contrite, and paving the way for Yousaf to step into her shoes.
One of his first tasks in the job? To drag the country into a doomed-before-it-started legal fight with Westminster over the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. Why? Because the Greens signalled they would walk if he didn’t.
In doing so, Yousaf showed the women of this country his hand, telling them he was willing to abandon vast swathes of the population in pursuit of the woke agenda spoon-fed to him by his new pals Patrick and Lorna. In appeasing a party that represented fewer than 10 per cent of Scottish voters, he let down not just Scotland’s women and girls, but also the vast majority of the Scottish people.
It wasn’t the best of starts. And yet it set the tone for the rest of Yousaf’s hapless premiership. This is a man who has referred to women as ‘cis’, and who steered in a new hate crime law which specifically left out women. And while there are plans in place for a new standalone law on misogyny, it will also include trans women (already protected by the hate crime law), because ‘they will often be the ones who suffer threats of rape or threats of disfigurement for example’.
IT was a statement made without a shred of evidence that made many women feel as though they were being treated poorly by their own government. Rowling was once again on hand, this time describing Yousaf as having ‘absolute contempt for women’.
Now Yousaf too has fallen on his sword in the manner of his predecessor, with a resignation speech in which he too was also teary, yet not contrite. History may judge him a little more kindly than Sturgeon, because in breaking the Bute House Agreement he has, at least, found himself on the right side of it.
Perhaps this is the ultimate lesson here. The agreement was doomed from the start not because of spats over emissions or bottle deposit schemes, but because the SNP chose to walk into a coalition agreement pinned on gender politics, and let itself be dictated to by politicians peddling a narrow and extremist ideology.
But nothing has changed. Any new First Minister will, with a minority government, still need their backing if they want to get anything done in Holyrood. Despite the disaster of the last three years the Greens hold the keys to power, and as a result Scotland is still mired in gender politics. Actual politics – getting things done around the issues people care about – remains a pitiful sideshow from an even more pitiful government.
The SNP’s obsession with identity politics has already claimed two scalps. Whoever steps into Bute House next had best watch out.
‘Entangled in a minority issue that affects so few members of the population’