Humza Yousaf’s UN row is entirely of his own making

Humza Yousaf has a gift for landing himself at the centre of crises of his own making. One recalls his advice during Covid for people to ‘think twice’ before calling 999 for an ambulance or his asking a group of Ukrainian women refugees ‘where are all the men’. 

More recently there was his Quixotic defence of XL Bully dogs and the futile backing of the former health secretary, Michael Matheson, over his iPad expenses. These were unforced errors he could ill afford. Now Humza Yousaf has managed to confect an extraordinary media storm over an apparently innocuous government donation of £250,000 to a Gaza relief organisation, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

Notoriously thin-skinned, the First Minister erupted when it was suggested by the Conservative MSP Stephen Kerr that he should make a ministerial statement to explain this use of public money. Yousaf went ballistic. On Twitter/X he accused Kerr, and the Daily Telegraph which had reported the donation, of ‘Islamophobia’, ‘outrageous smears’ and pursuing a ‘far-right conspiracy’.

So what on earth is this all about? There was nothing unusual in the Scottish government making awards to humanitarian causes. If Yousaf had sent £250,000 to Ukrainian relief agencies he would probably have been applauded for it. However, it emerged that the FM had made the award in early November against the wishes of his civil servants. They had advised that the money should go, not to the UNRWA, but to the UN children’s organisation UNICEF for a programme to improve water quality in Gaza. This has been confirmed in documents released after a Freedom of Information inquiry. 

OK, so Yousaf didn’t agree with his civil servants. First ministers often don’t. So what? Well, the problem here was the timing. Humza Yousaf made the donation to UNRWA, which has since faced accusations by Israel of employing Hamas terrorists, on 2 November last year, at precisely the moment he was seeking to exfiltrate his wife Nadia’s parents, Elizabeth and Maged El-Nakla from Gaza where they had been in fear for their lives. The cash was awarded prior to a meeting that day with UNRWA representatives. The next day, 3 November, Yousaf’s relatives were allowed safe passage out of the strip. 

Now, this was all purely circumstantial and there is no evidence that the First Minister paid a ransom, or that public money was used in any way to facilitate his relatives’ evacuation. There is no obvious way in which UNRWA had the contacts, or the will, to engineer the safe passage of his relatives to the West. 

Nevertheless, opposition politicians put two and two together and made five. The Scottish Tory MSP Stephen Kerr, who sits on Holyrood’s standards committee, demanded an assurance that there was no ‘conflict of interest’ involved. ‘[It] raises serious questions’, said Kerr, ‘about what his motivations [were] for using taxpayers money in the area’. 

Now, most of the Scottish media thought Kerr’s intervention was somewhat of a stretch, given there was no sign of any breach of the ministerial code. The story seemed, as they say in the US, to be a bit of a ‘nothing burger’ and everyone thought the story would die a natural death. 

But Yousaf’s fulminations on social media and his excoriation of Stephen Kerr for asking legitimate, if rather insensitive, questions about the donation injected life into the story. The deputy leader of the SNP, Keith Brown, then went on Good Morning Scotland yesterday to accuse Kerr of Islamophobia and effectively demand that he be sacked by Rishi Sunak. ‘The Prime Minister,’ he said, ‘should condemn the [Daily Telegraph] article and make sure Stephen Kerr is not allowed to stand as a Westminster candidate.’ Sunak has yet to respond. 

This was all beginning to look like an instance of the so-called ‘Streisand Effect’, when a cack-handed attempt to kill a story only gives it greater publicity. By hurling accusations of racism and Islamophobia, Yousaf looked and sounded rattled. He became the story. 

The row has also drawn attention to the way the First Minister has departed from UK government policy, not just on his support for UNRWA, but also in his highly partisan rhetoric about the war. Yousaf has accused Israel of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Gaza and says it is inflicting ‘collective punishment’ on Palestinian civilians in breach of international laws on genocide. These are not the views of HM government. 

In future, Yousaf would be wise to hand his Twitter/X account over to his aides. Sometimes a dignified silence speaks more eloquently than angry words.