Did Humza Yousaf think it through? When he decided, late on Wednesday night, to pull the plug on the Green-SNP coalition arrangement, did he game-out the consequences? That is the question political Scotland is asking this morning as Yousaf’s job hangs, by common agreement, in the balance 24 hours after he unilaterally ended the Bute House cooperation agreement.
So Humza Yousaf could possibly live to fight another day
Did he consider the possibility that, by dumping his Green coalition partners so abruptly, he was likely to hand the fate of his administration, effectively, to Alex Salmond, leader of the breakaway Alba party and one of his greatest political foes? For that seems to be what has happened. Salmond is smirking fit to burst.
The Scottish Greens decided in their fury last night to vote with the Scottish Conservatives in next week’s motion of no confidence in Humza Yousaf. Since they’d just accused Yousaf of being a prisoner of the right this didn’t make a lot of ideological sense. But hell hath no fury like a party spurned. Labour and the Scottish Liberal Democrats have also lined up with the Scottish Tory leader, Douglas Ross.
Since the SNP has only 63 out of 129 MSPs, the arithmetic puts the casting vote in the hands of the former SNP community safety minister, Ash Regan, who defected last year from the SNP to Salmond’s Alba party. Since she would do nothing without her leader’s agreement, it effectively puts Alex Salmond in charge of events.
It could be curtains for the First Minister. The final episode in the short but chaotic career of Humza ‘Useless’ – or ‘Humza the Brief’ as Salmond put it last night. However, the situation may yet be salvageable.
Yousaf may not be the sharpest tool in the box, but he has some pretty sharp advisers in his camp, including his senior special adviser, Kevin Pringle. Pringle was also Alex Salmond’s amanuensis back in the day when Salmond was the SNP leader and first minister. Pringle may well have calculated that Salmond would not readily collapse the SNP government since that would damage the prospects for his own rival nationalist outfit, Alba. It would be a step too far for a life-long supporter of independence to appear to hand power to the unionist parties. Better to demand a good deal in return for Ash Regan’s vote, and go down in SNP history as the saviour of his old party in its hour of need. And in the process make Humza Yousaf beg.
Of course, Ash Regan has her own mind, but the betting is that she will not cast a vote with the Tories. The Spectator writer, Stephen Daisley, suggested on X that she should demand that JK Rowling is made Minister of Magic. She replied that she was prepared to consider this ‘if I get a free wand’.
More seriously, Regan says she wants action on ‘independence, women’s rights and competence in government’. A deal on those vague ambitions should be doable for Yousaf. She will presumably expect that the unpopular Gender Recognition Reform Bill, currently stalled by the UK government, is put out if it’s misery, along with puberty blockers and the proposed ban on trans ‘conversion therapy’. Yousaf should be able to manage that too.
So Humza Yousaf could possibly live to fight another day. But it will still sting the master of Bute House who famously said that Ash Regan was ‘no great loss’ when she left the SNP over his trans policies. And of course this assumes that there are no further bumps in the road.
It has been suggested that some other rebellious SNP MSP, like the veteran Fergus Ewing, might suddenly decide to abstain next week. The Inverness MSP and former minister was briefly suspended by Humza Yousaf last year for supporting a motion of no confidence in the Scottish Green minister Lorna Slater, who has now of course been suspended for keeps by Humza Yousaf. He may not be ready to make nice. Ewing has been a supporter of Yousaf’s leadership rival, the former finance secretary, Kate Forbes. She has said she fully supports the current first minister, but that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t stand if Yousaf fell.
Next week’s vote is only a motion of confidence in the incumbent first minister. Under Holyrood’s rules, if an alternative FM can be found within one month, the SNP government could theoretically continue under new management without a snap election. That is a stretch of the imagination of course, but these are stretching times.
At any rate, Yousaf cannot assume that all SNP MSPs can be relied upon to dig him out of a hole of his own making. He may find, as the old saying goes, that to escape the hole he needs first to stop digging. A number of his colleagues reportedly think he is already in too deep to be saved.
Lucy Dunn, Fraser Nelson and Katy Balls discuss Humza Yousaf’s fate on Coffee House Shots:
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