Uh oh. There’s more trouble in nationalist paradise. A series of interviews with past and present Scottish government ministers have been published on the Institute for Government website as part of a devolved government series – and they make for some rather revelatory reading…
As if the Nats hadn’t aired their dirty laundry enough, the IfG interviewees – including former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and disgraced ex-health minister Michael Matheson – pulled no punches when conversations turned to their colleagues. One person in particular came out of it all worse for wear – with hapless Humza Yousaf on the receiving end of a rather lot of criticism.
First, the SNP’s former Dear Leader Nicola Sturgeon slammed her successor for the way in which he cut off his government’s coalition with the Scottish Greens – which led to him resigning from the post not long after. ‘I think crashing that agreement was catastrophic and – politics aside – totally the wrong thing to do for stable government,’ she fumed. Sturgeon went on to take another dig at her successor, lamenting her decision to step down from the top job. ‘I think it turns out I was wrong about this, but I convinced myself that if I took myself out somebody else would be able to reset things. Obviously that didn’t happen and hasn’t happened.’ Ouch.
Former SNP minister-turned-Alba politician Ash Regan was also pretty scathing about her onetime leadership rival. Quizzed on her relationship with Yousaf when she started working under the then-justice secretary, Regan remarked cryptically: ‘I observed that cabinet secretaries really can decide what they work on and what they don’t work on.’ She went on:
Certainly with Humza, if he didn’t want to do something – either because he didn’t want to do it or because of time pressures or whatever – it just got delegated to the junior minister. But if it was something that he thought he could get positive media out of, or something that he thought would get him positive attention from the first minister, then he would immediately pounce on it – even if it should have been in the junior minister’s area.
Burn…
In fact, the only SNP politician to be positive about hapless Humza – who lasted just over a year in the top job – was his onetime health secretary Michael Matheson. ‘Humza [Yousaf] was the most collective of the first ministers that I experienced,’ the Nat told the IfG. ‘Humza was much more keen on getting people to open up, say their view, express their view.’
It’s a rather curious claim given that Matheson himself was forced to leave Yousaf’s government after, er, closing up about the details of his £11,000 iPad roaming bill scandal – which the ex-health secretary went on to insist was ‘completely blown out of all proportion’. Good heavens. Will the Nats ever stop pointing the finger and learn some contrition? Don’t hold your breath…
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