I’m trying not to run round and round the same subject (there is policy stuff going on I want to look at), but my correspondence seems to demand otherwise. Over the weekend I sense the SNP crossing over a tipping point – and so did others. I don’t think there is now much remaining chance of the SNP not losing power in 2026.
The reason is that if there was any chance – any chance – that the SNP was going to pull itself together after the Humza Yousaf period and a terrible election result, it would have begun with a sharp slowing down of the chaos. The opposite is happening. Monkey/airport remains the article where I cover this most clearly but I think it might help just to hammer the why part a bit more.
Why is this happening? I don’t want to go through the fundamental structural reasons this government keeps failing because l best explained that via this short series I wrote during the Sturgeon era. All those problems remain.
What I want to cover here is the seemingly endless unforced errors and the reverse-Midas sense that if the SNP leadership touches it, it will fail. To do that I want to take at face value the last gasp demand of the few remaining loyalists – to give John Swinney a chance.
OK, let’s – but I assume we’re apply the normal criteria, like ‘fine, so long as you don’t make it worse’ or ‘right, but you need to stop generating chaos for no reason’. Which means that five minutes in, when for reasons no-one I’ve ever met understands, he decided to try and protect Michael Matheson from facing consequences for taking money he wasn’t due and then lying about it, including to the media and the Presiding Officer, criteria one is failed.
So let’s chalk that down to ‘beginners nerves’ (despite this being the second time he was leader and after a long period as Deputy First Minister…). The first big task was to prepare and run a vigorous election campaign with a simple, central message offering a clear reason for people to stay with the party.
If you’re serious about giving him a chance rather than whitewashing failures, you would need to see evidence that he had steered the party away from the worst-case electoral scenario. Not a good result, just not the worst possible. Well it was a shit campaign with no clear message and it was the worst result possible.
There is no evidence that Swinney did anything at all but make things worse. So let’s keep extending the amnesty here; if he can’t take the worst out of an inevitable electoral setback, he absolutely must have a robust, energetic, creative response. Post-election the SNP should have been in overdrive, trying to set a new narrative for the 18 months before the Holyrood Election gets under way.
Swinney has one remarkable achievement he can actually claim – somehow he has taken the chaos of the Yousaf era and made it worse
That didn’t happen. The party appears paralysed and more effort seems to have gone in to managing the membership and controlling the conference than giving the public any hint that the SNP has received the message it was sent in the election. That constitutes three worrying fails in just over two months.
And then he manages casually to misread both the public mood and the mood of his party so, so badly that he ends up in a position where the party is falling apart over a tone-deaf, politically-illiterate meeting with a Israeli Deputy Ambassador. People keep asking me how he couldn’t see the inevitable result coming. I simply don’t know.
All I can tell you is that this is all in my professional field and someone who achieved four fails of the scale of these fails and managed it all in the first three months of their tenure would be looking for new employment. Swinney has no chances left. He has one remarkable achievement he can actually claim – somehow he has taken the chaos of the Yousaf era and made it worse.
How much evidence do you need? How bad do things need to be before you stop asking us to give this lot a chance? John Swinney’s chief of staff is a man named Colin McAlister. He was a key figure in the coup which led to Yousaf’s downfall (which an honourable man would have resigned over since young-one is meant to get stabbed in the back by their own Chief of Staff). He advised Yousaf on every ill-advised screw-up of his era.
In fact Yousaf is making it pretty clear to anyone who’ll listen (privately) that the majority of his blunders resulted from listening to McAllisters’ advice. He dreamed up the disastrous Council Tax freeze. He oversaw the Matheson affair. He’s in ultimate control of government policy. If McAllister touches it, it goes wrong. You could change leader ten times and it would keep going wrong.
But, lovely as it would be to blame all this on some backroom staff, it doesn’t stand up. Swinney and Yousaf should still have had the savvy to say ‘no’ to this litany of bad advice. And look at the others. During the Yousaf era Jenny Gilruth was widely attacked in education circles for being a ‘non-minister’ that didn’t seem to be doing anything.
So the exam results come round and yet again she gives the impression of being a bystander. Or take Angus Robertson himself. By this point you shouldn’t need a specific reason to fire him. He made a reputation through talking, nothing more, and this current ministerial post is his first real job in actual governmental politics.
He immediately screwed up the census (literally first time this has ever happened – even Boris Johnstone managed a successful census), has gone on to have a worse reputation in the arts sector than any minister I can ever remember, will leave with the arts sector in the worst mess it has ever been in, and now he’s brought the party into disrepute.
It is quite something to have a career that short with that many serious screw-ups and not a meaningful achievement to your name. Shona Robison has gone from worst health minister in the history of devolution (I’m reliably told by my health policy group) to being the worst finance minister. Shirley-Anne Sommerville has never performed well in any role she’s ever had. Fiona Hyslop saw the CalMac mess and decided the best bet was to do nothing at all…
And I don’t have space remaining to look at the rest of the Spads or the team in HQ or the state of the backbenches. Why is this going wrong? Why is it getting worse? Why is it that the party keeps changing its leader and it doesn’t help? Because literally all they change is the leader. They refuse to accept that there is a deeper fundamental problem.
The deeper fundamental problem is that the party is substandard at almost every level and the handful of genuinely talented people in there (Kate Forbes, Ivan McKee, possibly Tom Arthur, possibly Mairi McAllan) and the larger group of not-brilliant but perfectly solid figures (Angela Constance, Neil Grey, Mairi Gougon, Paul McLennan) are drowning among the third-raters.
You can’t give leaders endless leeway unless you are happy to lose
Why does the SNP seem incapable of getting its act together? Because you can’t do anything effective with an ineffective team. It is a massively, woefully ineffective team, structured in a pattern which is almost guaranteed to do things badly, obsessively cutting off any hint of power or influence to anyone who is not part of the low-quality team.
It’s a little bit like seeing the fastest ship on the seas commandeered by people who don’t know how to sail and whose efforts mainly go into throwing anyone who does know how to sail overboard so no-one on the ship knows more than the captain’s team – who know nothing.
This is a really simple issue which is so simple people are squinting at it, looking for more complicated explanations. The SNP can’t buy a good headline because the SNP is now so low-quality in terms of the personnel in key positions that they just keep running into the same patio door over and over again, wondering why they can’t get into the kitchen, with the children shouting ‘but there’s glass!’ and then getting sent to bed early for insolence while mum and dad sort out this patio door thing.
Swinney had three months not to fuck up four times. You can’t give leaders endless leeway unless you are happy to lose. Keeping Swinney and hoping for the best won’t work. Just swapping out Swinney for another leader won’t work. Until the party accepts that this level of error is not normal and should not be tolerated it is done for.
Until it understands why it makes these errors and removes the people responsible, it is done for. Until it rebuilds capacity, capability and a culture of savvy, a culture of competence, it is done for. Until it looks at its systems and processes and understand why they are failing, until it revises and modernises them, it is done for.
Until the SNP has inside its core team people capable of devising and running an election campaign which might reasonably be expected to encourage voters to vote for it, it is done for. This isn’t a discussion point any more, this is now the cold, hard reality of the next morning and this is not working, not working at all.
It is now well over 20 years since the SNP last rebuilt itself. It has deteriorated so badly in that time that it is no longer a renovation job, it needs rebuilt. Just about the only ray of hope I can offer party members is that it takes much less time to rebuild this kind of machine than you think. The difficult part isn’t the rebuilding, it’s clearing the ground.
Give Swinney a chance? Tried that, it failed horribly. Think your task is to slide in a slightly better version more able to describe how great the party is and that will do? That too will fail horribly. Swinney must be removed along with every one of the team that has creates this disaster. But your task isn’t to find a better communicator, it is to find someone who knows how to rebuild a political party.