After the tears, the recriminations. Just who scuppered the putative deal between Humza Yousaf and Ash Regan MSP that could have saved Yousaf’s bacon? The Alba leader, Alex Salmond, told the BBC’s World at One that Humza Yousaf had been on the phone to Regan at 7.30 a.m. today to say that her terms were ‘very reasonable’. It was, Salmond implied, a done deal.
Sturgeon was not going to be content with any kind of deal that gave Salmond indirect influence over the fate of the Scottish National party
Clearly, others in the SNP thought differently, and five hours later, Humza Yousaf was making a tearful farewell to Bute House.
In his resignation statement, Yousaf insisted that he’d made the decision to resign at the weekend after he realised he could not retain the support of the Scottish Green MSPs. They were, he said, ‘hurt and upset’ at the manner in which he had ended the coalition agreement.
Mind you, their hurt feelings had been made abundantly clear to him last Thursday. The Green co-leader Lorna Slater was almost hysterical in her accusations of ‘betrayal’, saying Yousaf was ‘selling out future generations to appease the most reactionary forces in the country’ Can the First Minister (Yousaf remains FM until he tenders his formal resignation) really have been so naïve as to think that the Greens would just turn around and support him in the confidence motion this week?
What seems more credible is that Yousaf had indeed assumed that an arrangement with the sole Alba MSP, Ash Regan, would be acceptable to the SNP parliamentary group. Surely, he thought, they’d want to save the Scottish government against the Tories. Big mistake. He reckoned without the old guard, by which I mean the former first minster, Nicola Sturgeon, and her confederates. These include the net zero secretary, Mairi McAllan, and the education secretary, Jenny Gilruth, both potential leadership contenders.
Sturgeon has been a deadly enemy of Alex Salmond since 2019 when he defeated her Scottish government in the Court of Session over sexual harassment allegations. She was not going to be content with any kind of deal that gave Salmond indirect influence over the fate of the Scottish National party. Nor were the women she had promoted when she was leader.
We will probably never know what direct pressure was placed on Yousaf to make him decline the Alba offer. Would the Sturgeonites have voted with the Tories and Labour in the motion of no confidence this week? Hardly. Perhaps there were other more subtle inducements and/or threats.
At any rate, the only way Yousaf could have survived was if he’d accepted Ash Regan’s terms, which were drafted in such a way as he could hardly reject them. Regan’s demands were laughably undemanding. In her letter to Yousaf she called for ‘competence in government’ prioritising ‘the rights of women and children’ and placing independence ‘front and centre’ of the Scottish government’s agenda. Yousaf implied that he could not accept these terms without ‘trading my values and principles… simply for retaining power.’ That makes no sense.
And so the SNP continues onward and downward to probable electoral disaster in the UK general election. Nicola Sturgeon’s stalwart political groundskeeper, John Swinney is, we’re told, being press-ganged into standing for leader. He’s the only figure remotely acceptable to more or less everyone. But he has been leader before, from 2000 to 2004, and was an unmitigated disaster. He can surely not be in post for long.
What is clear is that the SNP is now disastrously divided. The most capable candidate is clearly the former finance secretary, Kate Forbes, who ran Humza Yousaf very close in last year’s leadership race. But the Green co-leader, Patrick Harvie, told BBC Radio again yesterday that he could not tolerate her ‘socially conservative’ values. He’ll want the more ‘woke’ candidate, Jenny Gilruth who is biddable and speaks fluent trans. That’s the only obvious candidate the Greens can do business with.
But there are powerful voices in the SNP in and out of Holyrood who will find this situation intolerable and they won’t stay silent for long. After being thrown out of the Scottish government, the Greens have landed back in the driving seat and are being allowed to decide who can be first minister of Scotland. That is never going to work.
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