As he took office last week commentators, myself included, compared the new First Minister Humza Yousaf to Liz Truss, the chaotic, unpopular and short-lived former leader of the Conservative Party. Yousaf is similarly unpopular with voters, has a record of serial ministerial failure and, like Truss, has surrounded himself with a cabinet of cronies. Nor is Yousaf expected to linger very long in Bute House. Right on cue, the first poll since Humza’s installation as FM shows the SNP lead over Labour cut to 6 per cent – enough for the nationalists to lose 18 seats in next year’s general election.
However, now we have seen the First Minister’s priorities after his first week in office, perhaps the better comparison is not with Liz Truss but with Jeremy Corbyn. The Humza ministerial team is what a Corbyn cabinet might have looked like had Jezza won in 2017: young, red-green and pronoun-friendly, complete with a minister, Emma Roddick, who describes herself ‘queer’.
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