Is Humza Yousaf up to the task?

As expected, Humza Yousaf has won the SNP leadership election and, barring something extraordinary, will become the next First Minister of Scotland. Yousaf may have been the bookies’ choice but that’s about as far as the favourability extends. Yousaf had a -20 rating with the general public of Scotland and only +11 with his own party (just 33 per cent of the party’s 72,000 members voted for him).

Yousaf is widely regarded as incompetent, gaffe prone, and charmless. His much-tweeted speech on the ‘whiteness’ of Scottish society, which seemed designed to annoy the 96 per cent of Scots who are Caucasian, is one of the most controversial in the inglorious history of the Scottish parliament. It will haunt him, as will his monumentally insensitive question to a group of Ukrainian women during the campaign (‘Where are all the men?’). 

He so struggled to find any tangible achievements to boast of during the leadership hustings that he was reduced to claiming credit for the Queensferry Crossing, a project which was almost completed before he became transport minister (his only contribution seems to have been a six-month delay at the tail end of the process).