Can Humza Yousaf unite the SNP?

It was announced to a particularly tense room at 2 p.m. that Humza Yousaf had won the SNP leadership race. The contest was expected to be close and many people assumed that if second preferences were accounted for, Kate Forbes would most likely prevail. Ash Regan’s voters didn’t quite manage to swing it in Forbes’s favour and Yousaf won by just over 2,000 votes.

He is set to become both the youngest first minister of Scotland, and the first Muslim leader in the UK. For him, this election win means breaking records and perhaps Yousaf thought this pattern would continue when he made his first move as leader of the Scottish National party: Yousaf said he would be asking Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for a Section 30 order ‘right away’ which would allow Scotland to hold an independence referendum. But, just as calls for another independence vote have been rejected in the past, Yousaf’s luck was to be no different.