Alex Massie Alex Massie

Scottish Labour’s new leader is unlikely to trouble Davidson or Sturgeon

In the end, it wasn’t even close. Richard Leonard now takes ownership of the black spot handed to every leader of the Scottish Labour party. He defeated Anas Sarwar, the son of the former MP Mohammed of that ilk and the early presumed favourite in the race, by 12,469 votes to 9,516. Mr Leonard is the party’s sixth leader in a decade.

Sarwar began the contest with several disadvantages, the first of which being that he was relatively well-known. That was sufficient to win him the support of most of his Holyrood colleagues but a grave handicap in terms of a party membership craving something – anything – new. His background hardly helped either. Being a millionaire who sends his children to one of Glasgow’s more prestigious private schools was one thing; the discovery that the Sarwar family business – a lucrative cash and carry enterprise – did not pay its workers the so-called living wage, quite another.

Leonard, by contrast, had the support of the trade unions, especially the GMB for whom he had worked as an organiser for twenty years before winning a list seat in the Scottish parliament last year. The contest was in large part dominated by an unseemly scramble to determine which candidate could sign up the most new members, with, in broad terms the unions matched against the Sarwar machine in Glasgow. The former prevailed amidst all the usual claims of dirty tricks and questionable dealing that are a traditional part of any Scottish Labour stramash.

Leonard began the campaign as the unknown quantity and, remarkably, ends it as the unknown quantity too. He is not a household name even in households that pay attention to politics. If nothing else, this gives him a frisson of novelty.

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