A new week has come around, and it brings yet more turmoil for the SNP. Calls for Nicola Sturgeon to resign as MSP for Glasgow Southside have grown louder after a leaked video showed the former SNP leader angrily warning colleagues about speaking negatively of the party’s finances. Despite her colleagues returning to the Scottish parliament post-recess, Sturgeon’s spokesman confirmed that the former First Minister will not in fact be back in Holyrood this week – ‘to ensure the focus is on the new First Minister’. Nevertheless, Humza Yousaf’s time is still being consumed by desperate attempts to convince the public that nothing is amiss.
‘I don’t think there is any reason whatsoever for Nicola Sturgeon to even consider resigning from the party,’ Yousaf told journalists at the Scottish Trades Union Congress in Dundee today. He said earlier that he could not ‘understand the reasons or rationale’ behind those calling for Sturgeon to be suspended and remarked that ‘we’re far past the point where Nicola Sturgeon, for example, has to account for her husband’s actions.’
And Yousaf doesn’t just have his work cut out clearing up his predecessor’s mess: one of the new First Minister’s MPs, Margaret Ferrier of Rutherglen and Hamilton West, is likely to face a by-election after she was caught during the pandemic travelling from London to Glasgow by train while having Covid. Ferrier has appealed the Standards Committee’s that recommendation she be suspended from the House of Commons for 30 days – delaying a by-election, for now at least.
Four weeks in and the Union is in the best shape it’s been for 15 years. For Humza, April really is the cruellest month…
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