Richard Leonard’s successor has an unenviable task ahead

Seventh time lucky? Richard Leonard, who has resigned this afternoon, was the sixth Scottish Labour leader since the SNP elbowed the party out of power in 2007. His tenure was the second-longest since devolution began, mostly because Labour is in such bad nick north of the border that no one else wants the job. The Yorkshire-born Scot secured the leadership in 2017 in part by allowing the impression to get about that he was a Corbynista. In truth, he hails from the harder edge of the soft-left and in his three years at the helm of Scottish Labour he did not shift the party significantly to the left. He leaves little in the way of a legacy and cannot claim to have changed much.

Since I called for him to resign last September, I can hardly eulogise him now, but it deserves saying that he is a decent sort who always seemed out of place at the weekly First Minister’s Questions jousts.