After driving without insurance as transport minister, his career’s been one long car crash
Thirteen months of blunder and self-inflicted chaos: Humza’s lived up to his ‘Useless’ soubriquet...
Two words have been a millstone around Humza Yousaf’s neck since he entered Bute House: ‘Humza Useless’. The jibe originated not with a waspish newspaper columnist or acid-tongued opponent but with his sibling. As Yousaf recently told an interviewer: ‘My sister once called me that. I think it’s all her fault, for coming up with that nickname.’
Sisterly joshing, perhaps, but the term resonated for a reason. As the First Minister resigns, 13 unlucky months after first taking up the office, the epithet looks set to become his epitaph.
For his tenure has been marked by blunder, miscalculation, unforced error and self-inflicted injury, up to and including the baffling decision to jettison his Green allies and his even more baffling conviction that this would strengthen his hand. In the space of a week, Yousaf managed to topple his own leadership, with only marginal assistance from his opponents.
As he contemplates the wreckage of his premiership, steered onto the rocks by his own hand, the First Minister might be wondering whether his critics – and his sister – had a point all along.
Enoch Powell said that all political careers end in failure but in Yousaf’s case failure has been a constant throughout.
In one ministerial posting after another, he distinguished himself as a political liability.
As transport minister, he failed to deliver the Ferguson Marine ferries, which went on to
‘His record is a blank page. He leaves no legacy’
become one of the longest-running infrastructure sagas in Scotland. As justice secretary, he thwarted his own plans to drag the British Transport Police under the aegis of Police Scotland.
As health secretary, he presided over target-failing waiting times for Accident and Emergency, cancer and mental health treatment.
As his one-time rival Kate Forbes infamously put it: ‘when you were a 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?’
Those words proved prophetic, for after narrowly winning the 2023 contest to replace Nicola Sturgeon, he went on to do an even worse job as First Minister than in any of his previous roles.
Then, he was failing on the sidelines. Now, he was failing up front, for all to see.
There was a good deal of comment at the time to the effect he had inherited a poisoned chalice. But across a decade in government, he had done more than most to lace the grail. of so many of the errors and failings of the Sturgeon era, he was a contributing author.
The fatal embrace of identity politics. The mis-steps over Brexit and independence. A governing culture in which intentions mattered more than outcomes. These were the fruits of Sturgeonism but he helped cultivate them.
He was, to borrow a phrase, the continuity candidate.
what he leaves for his successor is more fetid, more putrid than what he inherited.
Sturgeon at least managed to hold a government together. The seventh First Minister will take the reins of a minority administration; its bridges with the Greens, if not burned, then severely charred; with Labour snapping at the party’s heels in the polls; and the Tories reinvigorated by Yousaf’s downfall.
The party confronts a general election in a matter of months. Its prospects do not look good.
Its financial arrangements remain the subject of criminal investigation. It can no longer raise the kind of cash that it once did. Public disquiet is growing about its dismal record of delivery in government. Few quick fixes present themselves.
In his 13 months in Bute House, Yousaf turned around not one of the Government’s or the party’s problems. In several cases, he made them measurably worse.
His personal record is a blank page. He leaves no legacy, no imprint on the nation.
There is no transformative policy that bears his name, no great legislative achievement as First Minister.
what will he be remembered for? The Hate Crime Act and its disastrous introduction? His abject failure to get the NHS back on track after Covid? Being pulled over for driving without insurance while transport minister?
Perhaps one or another of these things will stick in the public consciousness but, in the long run, I suspect a grimmer fate looms.
I’m not sure Yousaf will be remembered at all. Yes, he will always be Scotland’s sixth First Minister, its first under 40 and its first of Asian heritage. No one can take those achievements away from him.
But his tenure was so brief, and his political import so light, he is unlikely to remain long in the popular imagination.
His best chance of staying power might be his abrupt, chaotic and entirely self-inflicted downfall. He might go down in history as the SNP’s answer to Henry McLeish, a First Minister whose time in Bute House is remembered only for the way in which it ended.
The pursuit of power tends big egos and the loss of power can be wounding. To demit office abruptly is painful. To leave no trace you were ever there is unbearable.
Yet there is no way things could have turned out differently for Yousaf. The best that might be said of him, and perhaps the most damning too, is that he was always his authentic self. The impatience with injustice was the real Yousaf, but so was the towering smugness. The invincible faith in progress, but also the arrogant dismissal of all other opinions.
we attended Glasgow University at the same time and although I didn’t know him, I knew of him. He was well-liked, known for his Nationalist politics, and everyone assumed he’d end up an MSP.
As well they might, for Yousaf has always possessed that quality elusive to many in the political game: charm.
To those who treat politics as an extension of football and boo the opposing team as a matter of instinct, it might be difficult to accept that there is more to Yousaf’s demeanour than the shouty, sneery performance seen every week at First Minister’s Questions.
But the man knows how to work a room, how to make it seem as though he is sincerely invested in the concerns of whomever is in front of him at any given moment. I was that person more than once during his time as a junior and later Cabinet minister and I can confirm: Yousaf’s got patter.
Patter matters a hell of a lot in politics and so does charm, but they must be allied to substance and skill.
Bill Clinton had charm. Tony Blair had charm. Barack obama had charm. But they had something else: the ability to get things done.
And that is what Yousaf lacks. He is a spectacularly awful politician, so dazzlingly inept that
‘He is a spectacularly awful politician. Dazzlingly inept’
you find yourself watching his career the way rubber-neckers stare at gruesome car accidents.
He creates carnage everywhere he goes. You can’t not look.
Recall the hectic fallout from the police raids on SNP headquarters and the home of Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell in April 2023.
Colin Beattie, the party’s treasurer, had just been arrested and was still undergoing questioning at a police station. (He was later released without charge.)
Any First Minister with a lick of sense would have gone so thoroughly to ground that Anneka Rice couldn’t have found him.
Not Yousaf. He wandered through the corridors of Holyrood and directly into an ambush by journalists. What’s more, he answered their questions.
This was the impromptu press conference in which he described the arrest as ‘not helpful’ and stated: ‘I’m surprised when one of my colleagues is arrested.’ And, to the disbelief of reporters and the horror of his media advisers, when asked if the SNP was behaving in a criminal manner, he replied: ‘I certainly don’t believe it is at all.’
If he had painted a tunnel on the wall and tried to escape through it, in the style of Wile E. Coyote, it would have done less political damage than those answers. There are any number of examples of his lamentable political judgment.
After taking the leadership by a hair, he offered his rival Forbes a demotion to rural affairs secretary. It was an insult, one calculated to send her to the backbenches.
Yousaf could not forgive her for the stinging attacks she launched upon him during the contest.
He wanted to put her in her place and show he was in charge and didn’t need to build a broad-tent government. In the end, just one MSP who backed Forbes got a ministerial job.
All this fit of pique achieved was to deny him access to some of his party’s best talents and engender enmity at a time of growing disquiet on the backbenches over the direction of the government and its coalition with the Greens.
Instead of hugging his internal opponents tight, as a cannier leader would have done, he showed them the cold shoulder.
And because he gave them nothing, they owed him nothing. With that one petty, vindictive act, he hardened doubters into rebels.
He rashly promised, during the leadership election, to challenge the UK Government in court over its blocking of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. Here was the piece of legislation that arguably contributed to his predecessor’s abrupt resignation. A Bill that had spurred division and ill feeling within the SNP group. A measure that, as poll after poll confirmed, the public was dead-set against.
In using his Section 35 powers, Alister Jack had done Yousaf a roundabout favour.
The Bill had been passed, as Sturgeon and her Green allies demanded, but it had been prevented from becoming law by Westminster. Both sides of the deeply divisive issue could claim a victory.
Yousaf chose to revive the controversy with a case before the Court of Session that was always going to go the way it did: Jack had the power to block the Bill and had done so lawfully. In stirring up all that animosity, tearing off all those recently applied sticking plasters, Yousaf created more enemies for himself and laid bare the deficiency of his political decision-making.
And this, in the end, is what brought about his demise.
He is a prisoner of his own strategic naïveté, a man with a perverse fondness for setting tactical traps and leaping directly into them.
While critics will reel off their most disfavoured policies to explain his toppling, perhaps the Hate Crime Act or his support for gender selfidentification, the more prosaic truth is that it was the nature of the politician himself that did it.
He is not suited to leadership and never was. He failed in every post he was given because he lacks even basic political smarts.
He is the most damning indictment imaginable of a higher education in political science.
Some might consider this analysis unkind. I disagree.
What is unkind is a political party promoting someone beyond his ability and despite his ample record of incompetence, allowing him to rise all the way to the highest job in the land, where he then crashed and burned in the harsh glare of the media spotlight.
Yes, he is a big boy. Yes, he was ambitious and determined to get to the top. But there are plenty of people like that in all parties, and wiser heads find ways to keep them at a level appropriate to their abilities.
Instead of doing that, the SNP put some of the most momentous Cabinet portfolios – justice and health – in the hands of someone who should never have risen above the position of a junior minister for the environment or the arts or something similarly unchallenging. And, ultimately, they put him in charge of the country.
In this time, Yousaf did serious, substantial harm in his forays into criminal law, policing and the health service. And where he did not do harm, he was often a roadblock to the sort of reform that would have improved services and benefited those who rely on them.
His unsuitability for leadership undermined the office of First Minister, though it must be said his predecessor did not leave that office in particularly pristine condition.
For more than a year now, the governance of Scotland has played second fiddle to the First Minister’s mercurial priorities and his attempts to maintain his party’s alliance with the Greens.
Small businesses were left out of pocket and mistrustful of government by the deposit return debacle. Fishing communities, reliant on an already precarious industry, had the prospect of highly protected marine areas hanging over their heads.
Pupils and parents saw academic performance slide down the international rankings while the attainment gap continued to yawn.
Patients unable to access a GP were forced to turn to A&E, those in severe need of A&E found themselves waiting hours for an ambulance, and cancer patients had to dip into their savings to pay for treatment in the private sector.
Drugs deaths, already at the highest rate in Europe, somehow managed to increase.
In all the dysfunction and anguish and frustration caused to the country at large, there was not even a hint of progress for the SNP on independence.
Nothing the Nationalist rank and file could cling to, however callous it may sound, to justify the damage being done to public services.
Humza Yousaf did not move the constitutional dial forward by so much as a millimetre.
There are few consolation prizes in politics but most government leaders suddenly removed from power can soothe their bruised egos by reflecting on their achievements in office.
Power may have been snatched away from them but here is what they did when they had it.
Humza Yousaf will have no such reflections to comfort him. He achieved nothing that will last. He did nothing that will change people’s lives fundamentally and for the better. His premiership was 397 days of nothing.
If he is remembered at all by future generations, it will be as the First Minister who sacked two junior ministers and launched an inadvertent coup against himself in the process. In the end, his sister was right. He was useless.
‘Premiership was 397 days of nothing’