ROSS LOADED GUN, HUMZA SHOT HIMSELF IN FOOT… BUT KEIR HAS LAST LAUGH

This is the story of three leaders. Humza Yousaf was the ambitious Nationalist whose privileged upbringing and private education posed no hurdle to his seemingly effortless rise through the SNP ranks.

Douglas Ross was the state school educated Aberdeenshire boy from a farming family who graduated from agriculture college before entering politics, first as a councillor, then an MSP, then an MP.

And Sir Keir Starmer is the successful lawyer whose decision, late in life, to enter politics now looks set to have been the luckiest gamble of his life.

Each of them played a key role in recent events. If the gun was loaded by Mr Ross, it was fired by Mr Yousaf – who promptly shot himself in the foot.

And it is Sir Keir who looks set have the last laugh.

Both Mr Yousaf and Mr Ross eventually rose to lead their parties at Holyrood. And while Mr Yousaf was feted as Scotland’s first Muslim First Minister, Douglas Ross’s political obituary has been frequently drafted by sceptical observers.

Yet last week, when the career trajectories of the two men definitively clashed, it was the latter who emerged triumphant.

As underestimated in his political abilities as Humza Yousaf was overestimated, the Scottish Conservative leader can take much of the credit for ending Mr Yousaf’s brief Bute House career.

Of course, there were many other factors at play in this Shakespearean drama, the greatest of them being Mr Yousaf’s own misjudgment.

While there were good reasons to end the Bute House Agreement between the SNP and the Scottish Greens, there was no reason for the First Minister to handle it in such a clumsy, cloth-eared manner.

His abrupt summoning of Green co-leaders and junior ministers Lorna Slater and Patrick Harvie on Thursday morning to inform them that they were now out of a job was hardly the mark of a sure-footed political operator.

I t’s impossible to imagine either of Mr Yousaf’s predecessors, Alex Salmond or Nicola Sturgeon, handling such a sensitive political situation so badly.

The dismissal from government of Mr Harvie and Ms Slater was all the more bitter for the fact Mr Yousaf had so steadfastly supported the agreement.

It was finalised by Ms Sturgeon as First Minister and, in the face of criticism of the arrangement by Mr Yousaf’s two opponents in last year’s SNP leadership contest, he had defended it on a point of principle.

The Bute House Agreement would be safe in his hands.

And when he duly won that contest, albeit by a tighter margin than was comfortable over former finance secretary Kate Forbes, the Greens themselves welcomed the result and the guarantee it represented of their continued participation in government.

Perhaps Mr Yousaf’s enthusiasm for the co-operation agreement with the Greens would have been less robust had he been able to foresee what the future held for Nicola Sturgeon.

Defending the agreement as part of her legacy was a way of signalling to the SNP membership – which, at the time, was still utterly loyal to her – that he was the ‘continuity candidate’, Nicola’s preferred successor.

The tactic worked. But subsequent events – Ms Sturgeon’s arrest and release without charge as part of a police probe into SNP finances, and her husband, Peter Murrell, facing charges in connection with embezzlement as a result of the same investigation – might naturally have encouraged Mr Yousaf to consider distancing himself from his predecessor.

Instead, Mr Yousaf nailed his colours to a particularly shoogly mast. The Bute House Agreement was ‘worth its weight in gold’, he told one interviewer shortly after being installed as First Minister.

No wonder the Greens were confident in his continued support. And no wonder they were completely blindsided by his subsequent U-turn.

It was all very dramatic and almost typical of the pantomime to which Scottish politics in the devolution age so frequently descends.

It would have been tempting for Mr Ross to consider Napoleon’s dictum not to interrupt an opponent while he’s making a mistake.

This drama was not about him or any of the opposition parties, after all.

This was an internecine fight between Scotland’s main party of government and a tiny, though influential (up to that point) party of ecological, gender and economic extremists.

Tabling a vote of no confidence in the government at that point could have had the opposite effect to the one desired; it could have united the SNP around the First Minister against a common enemy.

Yet Mr Ross must have discerned in the hurt and anger expressed by the Green leadership that a crucial turning point in the history of this administration had been reached.

He pressed the nuclear button and waited to see what would happen. After that, it all fell apart so quickly.

However the arithmetic of the chamber was calculated, it was inconceivable Mr Yousaf would emerge from events this week as anything other than a fatally weakened leader, bereft of all authority.

Few would contradict the general view that he was right to pre-empt Mr Ross’s vote of no confidence and resign after barely a year in office.

S o what happens now? Whoever emerges to lead the SNP, either as a temporary caretaker – such as former deputy First Minister John Swinney – or as a longer-term prospect, may feel they’re being handed a poisoned chalice.

Who, after all, stands to benefit more from this week’s dramatic events at Holyrood than the leader of Labour at UK level, Sir Keir Starmer?

While the polls have shown a healthy lead for Labour since the dying days of Boris Johnson’s premiership, there is still a question mark over Labour’s chances of sealing the deal with the electorate without its traditional Scottish heartlands, lost to the SNP since that party’s 2015 landslide.

The past year of Humza Yousaf’s rule from Bute House has done nothing to change the narrative that the SNP’s domination of Scotland’s landscape is finally coming to an end. His last week has reinforced that impression.

In politics, as in comedy, timing is everything. Had this drama been performed even a year ago, the SNP would have some time to sort itself out, to take its time choosing a new leader and, more importantly, in deciding what it actually wants to do in government now that its legal limits in holding a second independence referendum have been so helpfully clarified by the Supreme Court.

But now, in April 2024, with a general election imminent, the fates of dozens of Nationalist MPs are in the balance, as is the working majority of a Labour government led by Keir Starmer.

If those Scottish seats were to fall, the future of SNP control at Holyrood itself would be in the balance, allowing Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar to follow Starmer’s path to success.

And if the SNP is a difficult party to lead at the moment, then consider its members’ mindset in 2026, having lost office in Edinburgh, having been reduced to a rump at Westminster, and – more importantly – having spent nearly two decades in office and yet failed to deliver the only thing they consider of any importance: Scottish independence.

Beset by the political fallout of unfulfilled promises, resented by angry party activists whose trust and faith have been betrayed, besieged by an energised Labour Party eager to regain its lost hegemony, the SNP stands today on the edge of a precipice.

Its position has been made no less precarious by the fact that its leader has chosen to jump first.

2024-04-29T22:06:43Z dg43tfdfdgfd