Today Humza Yousaf’s 100 days as First Minister, yet not even that has gone right: the nationalist leader has been upstaged by the departure of Mhairi Black earlier this week. The SNP Westminster group’s deputy leader announced she would not be standing for re-election on Tuesday, claiming that the culture of Westminster politics is too ‘toxic’. That makes six nationalist MPs who have now thrown in the towel, or six ‘Nats deserting the sinking ship’, as Scottish Labour’s deputy leader Jackie Baillie put it.
But this is certainly not the first time that Humza Yousaf has had the limelight stolen from him. His debut speech to Holyrood as First Minister in April was eclipsed by the police raid on Nicola Sturgeon’s home and the arrest of her husband, the former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, as part of a police probe into the party’s funds. The new SNP leader had hardly recovered from that before his party treasurer, Colin Beattie, was arrested three weeks later.
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