Iain Macwhirter

Nicola Sturgeon ‘could cry from one eye if she wanted to,’ Alister Jack told the UK Covid Inquiry this morning. It was an interesting medical observation from the Scottish Secretary presumably intended to suggest that the former first minister’s emotional moments in her evidence yesterday were contrived. Sturgeon fought back tears a number of times when she insisted she just wanted ‘to be the best first minister I could be’ during the pandemic, resolute in her denials that she had had ulterior political motives. ‘I didn’t believe it for a minute,’ Jack, the Tory MP for Dumfries asserted, roundly accusing the former first minister of politicising the pandemic.

We now know from evidence to the Covid Inquiry that Scottish government ministers were as prone to offensive language as Dominic Cummings. Nicola Sturgeon called Boris Johnson a ‘f***ing clown’, and Humza Yousaf called a Labour MSP a ‘twat’. If the government’s mass deletion of WhatsApp messages was designed to insulate it from embarrassment, it clearly hasn’t worked.  The SNP-supporting legions on social media are of course outraged that anyone should be upset at the language politicians use in private. Everyone thought Boris was a clown, so what’s the issue here? It’s not as if they were having parties in Bute House, is it?

The SNP government has rarely demonstrated great respect for legal precedent or the rights of the individual. When Humza Yousaf was justice secretary back in 2020, he forced through the most illiberal curbs on freedom of speech in British history with the Hate Crime (Scotland) Act. This criminalised 'stirring up hatred', even in the privacy of one's home. So it is perhaps not surprising that, as First Minister, Yousaf now seems bent on abolishing the right to trial by jury, one of the oldest legal protections against arbitrary injustice. The Victims, Witnesses and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill, before Holyrood’s justice committee this week, will introduce a pilot of judge-only trials in serious sex offences.

Humza Yousaf has just executed an embarrassing U-turn and effectively banned XL Bully dogs in line with England and Wales. This has inevitably unleashed a pack of bad canine puns about the SNP making a dog's breakfast of devolution. We always thought Humza Yousaf was barking, now we know. Boom boom.  This episode is another botched exercise in cross-border grievance mongering Laughter aside, this episode is another botched exercise in cross-border grievance mongering, something at which the SNP used to be so adept. When the UK government announced last September that there was to be a ban selling or breeding these aggressive animals, following a spate of attacks on people, Mr Yousaf said: not so fast.

It seems that Humza Yousaf is taking diversity seriously – though not as we know it. Scotland's First Minister has apparently welcomed the Christian fundamentalist former bus tycoon Brian Souter, regarded as a homophobe by the Scottish Greens, back into the SNP fold. Changed days.  The SNP needs all the help it can get with the business community in Scotland and Souter has been helping out schmoozing them, according to Politico. A freedom of information request revealed that Yousaf’s aides have been actively courting Scotland’s richest man following his sale of Stagecoach two years ago.  SNP donations have all but dried up in recent years and the party needs cash for the upcoming general election campaign.

As she faced her final press conference of 2022 last Christmas, the first minister of Scotland seemed unassailable. Nicola Sturgeon had negotiated the Covid pandemic with consummate skill – at least in terms of presentation. Her personal popularity, while not what it was, remained unnaturally high for the leader of a party that had been in government for 15 years. The opposition parties posed no obvious threat to SNP hegemony. She had no internal rivals to worry about.   Political downfalls are rarely so precipitate or dramatic Yet two months later Nicola Sturgeon was history, the SNP leadership was in ruins and Police Scotland were preparing to arrest key SNP figures in an investigation into the misuse of party funds. Political downfalls are rarely so precipitate or dramatic.

What do you think when you think about teachers? Two things, if you are anything like me: low pay and time off work with stress. It’s a hard job, no doubt. Teaching unions jealously guard their grievances and if you say that teachers are actually quite well paid and that teaching is a rewarding career you’ll be hounded by legions of miserabilists on social media. So better not tell them that from next year many teachers are to be classed as high earners thanks to the Scottish government’s latest stealth tax raid.  Basic grade teachers earning over £43,662 next year will find themselves paying a marginal tax rate of 42p. I’m told that many teachers will still have student debt to pay off too at a rate of 9 per cent.

Perhaps the Scottish government thinks it’s a good time to put out the rubbish. With the news agenda dominated by the Scottish Budget and with the Christmas recess imminent, First Minister Humza Yousaf has reportedly decided to abandon his appeal against the UK government’s Section 35 order on the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill. The bill, intended to make it easier for trans people to obtain gender recognition certifications, was attacked by ‘gender critical’ feminists, including former SNP leadership contender Kate Forbes. Westminster put the brakes on the legislation – a decision which sparked an SNP backlash. But now, if reports in the Herald are accurate, it seems Yousaf has finally seen sense.

Scottish nationalists have always looked to Scandinavian countries as models of what a caring, social democratic Scotland would look like if only it could escape the clutches of Westminster. Not anymore. National populism, or what the left call the far-right, is on the march across the Nordic landscape. The Sweden Democrats, the True Finns and the Norway Progress party have shifted the centre of political gravity in those supposedly socialist small states.

The first minister of Scotland, Humza Yousaf, has a painful choice following his latest defeat in the Court of Session today over the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill. Yousaf had challenged the UK government’s use of Section 35 to block the gender bill because it could undermine UK-wide protections for women. This futile exercise has already cost £230,000 in costs, and public patience is wearing thin on a bill that is opposed by two out of three voters in Scotland Now either Yousaf perseveres with this profoundly unpopular legislation on Self-ID for trans people, or he abandons his coalition arrangement with the Scottish Green party.

The former First Minister, Alex Salmond, is to sue Nicola Sturgeon and her former civil servants for ‘misfeasance’. In court documents today he accuses her and her officials of having ‘conducted themselves improperly, in bad faith and beyond their powers with the intention of injuring Mr Salmond’. The surprise is that it has taken him so long.   It is nearly four years since Salmond won his judicial review against the Scottish government over its mishandling of claims of sexual misconduct. Judges in the Court of Session, Scotland’s highest civil court, ruled in January 2019 that the Scottish government’s investigation into the allegations, overseen by the then-permanent secretary, Leslie Evans, had been ‘unlawful’ and ‘tainted with apparent bias’.

You have to hand it to the Scottish government: the deletion of WhatsApp messages is good preemptive news management, whether accidental, by default or deliberate. Once journalists get their hands on them, those curt, day-to-day messages can be just a tad embarrassing — as this week’s expletive-laden evidence to the UK Covid Inquiry confirms. The Scottish government may not, however, be subjected to the same level of message scrutiny. Just how many WhatsApps have been deleted we still do not know. The Scottish government policy on message deletion was confirmed yesterday in a convoluted statement from the deputy first minister Shona Robison, which came just after Dominic Cummings had finished giving his expletive-laden evidence to the UK Covid Inquiry.

It will no doubt be referred to in Whitehall circles in future as the ‘Jason Leitch protocol’. Scotland's clinical director appears to have escaped scrutiny by the UK Covid Inquiry. It was revealed last night that his WhatsApp messages sent during the pandemic were deleted at the end of each day. The Scottish government have this afternoon denied this, saying that it was not correct to say that Professor Leitch deletes his Whatsapp messages and that guidance had been followed. But this does not change the fact that by the time the 'do not destroy' notice was issued by the Inquiry, Leitch's messages were already gone.

Humza Yousaf’s main objective at this week's SNP conference, his first as leader, was to free himself from the constitutional millstone placed round his neck by his predecessor Nicola Sturgeon: the 'de facto' referendum. He has united the party in ditching that phrase, though the phoney plebiscite remains in spirit. The new policy states that if the SNP win a majority of seats at the next election the Scottish government will 'begin immediate negotiations with the UK government to give democratic effect to Scotland becoming an independent country'. The Labour party and the Conservatives will negotiate by empty chair and, if the SNP lose seats next year as expected, will say that the nationalists lost their proxy referendum — however they calculate it.

As the SNP gathers for its conference in Aberdeen this weekend, Humza Yousaf faces a sea of trouble. But worst of all for the party leader, he faces disillusion with the ‘divisive’ independence project itself, as expressed by Lisa Cameron, MP for East Kilbride, who has (uniquely in SNP history) left the party for the Conservatives. Don’t expect many to follow her path. However, she is not alone in rethinking her support for the SNP’s independence strategy. Others, like former Yes campaign strategist Stephen Noon, have been saying this week that the referendum route has become a dead end and that the SNP should revert to its older, incremental approach to advancing the economic powers of Holyrood.

For nearly half a century, the Scottish National Party based its independence project on 'Scotland’s Oil' which it claimed had been stolen by England. Now the SNP seems to be saying it wasn’t Scotland’s oil at all and wasn’t even the UK’s to steal. The SNP and their Green coalition partners have discovered that North Sea oil is owned by foreign capitalists and is anyway unusable in the UK. 'Most of this oil will be shipped abroad,' insisted the SNP First Minister, Humza Yousaf, last week 'and then sold back to us at whatever price makes the oil and gas industry most profit'. New fields like Rosebank off Shetland, he says, won’t therefore help reduce energy bills or replace oil and gas imports.