Scotland’s beleaguered First Minister Humza Yousaf is reportedly considering his position this morning, despite insisting on Friday that he would not resign from the post and intended ‘to win the vote of no confidence’. Hapless Yousaf made his bed on Wednesday morning by U-turning on the Bute House Agreement and ditching his coalition partners – after first U-turning on a key government climate target. Has he been swapping notes with Sir Keir Starmer?
The First Minister left in his wake a rather furious septet of eco-activists who now plan to form an unlikely alliance with the Tories, backing Douglas Ross’s no confidence motion in Yousaf. Meanwhile, the Scottish Labour party has gone one step further and lodged a vote of no confidence in the government. The legally binding vote is the one the First Minister is rather more concerned with, conceding to Channel 4 News that he ‘wouldn’t rule out a Holyrood election’. The Nats are determined to support him, with even Kate Forbes urging her parliamentary colleagues to back the SNP leader. But, in the plot twist of all plot twists, the kingmaker in all of this is the FM’s one-time leadership rival, political nemesis and the SNP defector Yousaf described as ‘no great loss’ to his party: Ash Regan.
As the fate of the First Minister hangs in the balance, let’s look back at Yousaf’s worst moments in the top job…
The gaffe-prone FM’s media struggles
The ongoing police probe into the SNP’s funds and finances has so far seen four arrests, three subsequent releases, two people still under investigation and one official charge. Over the last 12 months, hapless Humza has fielded hundreds of questions from the press on what exactly has been going on – and a smooth operator Yousaf is not.
When then-treasurer of the SNP, Colin Beattie, was arrested last April, the First Minister was tasked with facing off reporters in Holyrood. Was the SNP operating criminally, Yousaf was asked. ‘No, certainly I don’t believe it is at all,’ the newly-appointed FM responded gravely. Was he surprised by Beattie’s arrest? Giving a reply that would haunt his media advisers for weeks to come, Yousaf said: ‘Of course I’m surprised when one of my colleagues has been arrested.’ Er, you’re not supposed to make it sound like a regular occurrence, Humza…
Not that the SNP membership should have been surprised by their gaffe-a-day First Minister once again slipping up. It was only weeks earlier he had asked a group of female Ukrainian refugees where ‘all the men’ were – before they explained they were still in Ukraine, fighting the war. Awkward.
And when former Alex Salmond spinner, Kevin Pringle, returned to the fold, the impromptu press conferences the fresh-faced First Minister had been holding after FMQs were rather quickly scrapped. Not before he’d managed to get himself into a number of scrapes first, however…
The SNP’s nonsensical indy strategy
Once a single issue party, the SNP managed to break into the political mainstream after broadening its horizons to focus on more pressing issues like, um, literally anything else. Yet these days the First Minister seems awfully interested in regression. Independence, he says, will be ‘page one, line one’ of the SNP manifesto. And that’s about as far as Yousaf’s strategising has really got. The FM announced a new independence plan at a special conference last summer which was so confused that even his own spinners were left scratching their heads. He argued that winning the ‘most’ Westminster seats in Scotland at the next general election would be a mandate for independence. This was tightened up at the nationalists’ party conference a few months later, where the membership decided that winning a ‘majority’ of seats should be the goal. This would mean that independence negotiations would be initiated by the SNP if it were to win a minimum of 29 seats – which is, er, 14 less seats than what the party currently has. Make it make sense…
In fact, the strategy is so confusing that the brains behind it, hapless Humza himself, tripped up when he attempted to explain it on live TV. How reassuring…
The First Minister’s row back on dodgy renewables claim
The SNP has been living in fantasyland for so long now that the party can have trouble discerning fiction from reality. From rejoining the EU to pretending stationary painted ferries were the real deal, there are numerous examples to choose from. But when talking up Scotland’s green credentials, the First Minister was rather embarrassingly accused of making a false statement and forced to correct the record – literally. Yousaf faced a humiliating climbdown after he was called out by Tory MSP Liam Kerr for falsely stating that Scotland has the ‘majority of the renewables’ in the UK, leading him to have to correct the official Holyrood record. But it wasn’t the first time Scottish government figures had peddled the erroneous claim that Scotland had ’25 per cent of Europe’s offshore wind potential’. SNP MSP Angus Robertson and Scottish Green co-leader Lorna Slater came under fire after they too spread the misinformation, raising questions about when exactly they realised the claim was false. So much for all that ‘openness and transparency’ Yousaf promised for his premiership…
The curious case of Michael Matheson’s iPad
When the former health secretary realised he’d racked up an eye-watering £11,000 of roaming charges after using his parliamentary iPad in Morocco, he decided he’d prefer the public purse took the hit than paying the sum from his own wallet. Charming.
And in yet another example of poor leadership, instead of distancing himself from the unfolding scandal, Yousaf put pals before principles and stood by his friend. As an investigation into Matheson’s conduct was opened, the FM deflected questions by turning to the Tories’ record in government. After a tearful ex-health minister admitted his sons were responsible for the huge data bill, which he had tried to pass onto the taxpayer, Yousaf refused to take action. And when his Cabinet secretary was found to have breached the MSP code of conduct – and lied to the press – Yousaf defended his ally as a ‘man of integrity’. The First Minister then went on to refute suggestions that the newly-resigned minister should return his £13,000 golden goodbye and quit his job over the scandal. In hapless Humza’s Scotland, anything goes…
Humza Yousaf’s green scheme hypocrisy
The latest pledge binned by Yousaf’s administration has caused him one of his biggest headaches yet – and that’s saying something. The Scottish government ditched a key climate target last week, laying the blame at the door of – you guessed it – the UK government. It apparently forgot just how enraged SNP politicians had been when only months before, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak did similar, pushing back deadlines for the phasing out of petrol and diesel cars. Mr S hasn’t forgotten, though. Yousaf blasted Sunak’s government for being ‘on the wrong side of history’, while the net zero minister Màiri McAllan slammed the Tories for ‘an unforgivable betrayal of current and future generations’. Meanwhile Deputy FM Shona Robison claimed the Prime Minister was guilty of ‘misleading the public’. How the tables turn…
And hypocrisy isn’t the only charge Yousaf is facing over his climate target U-turn. When the Scottish government ditched the green goal last week, the Scottish Green party membership became positively incandescent with rage. The eco-activists demanded a vote on the future of the Bute House Agreement, rather frustrating a number of SNP backbenchers who felt those pesky Greens had no right to call the shots. It all culminated in hapless Humza bending to pressure and making a rather speedy about turn on his stance on the coalition. What the incumbent Nat-in-chief didn’t manage to foresee was the lodging of, er, multiple no confidence votes against him and his government after he lost his pro-indy majority. Will it all finally come crashing down for Humza Yousaf next week? Stay tuned…
Comments