Scotland

Just when you thought this election campaign couldn’t get any more tumultuous, Douglas Ross has announced he will resign as Scottish Conservative leader. He had lost the support of his colleagues – particularly those in Holyrood – following his decision to effectively take over a Westminster colleague’s constituency when that MP was seriously ill in hospital.  In a statement released this morning, Ross said he had come to the conclusion was no longer ‘feasible’ to be both an MP, MSP and party leader (something he had previously stated, but changed his mind on), but that he will continue to hold the role until after the election. He will also resign

Is Alex Salmond feasting on the misery of an SNP that, having hit its high watermark, is now having to work hard to hold onto its Westminster seats? Not at all, according to the Alba leader, who told Andrew Neil on Times Radio today that he was in fact trying to help the cause of his former party by going after pro-independence voters who would otherwise have stayed at home. In so doing, of course, he was not-so-subtly suggesting that the SNP aren’t giving voters a reason to turn out at all.  There’s 20 per cent of people who are either going to stay at home or going to vote

In public, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party is all humility. Starmer might currently be heading towards a general election landslide victory but the line is consistent: The party’s taking nothing for granted. Privately? Well, one of two of the party’s candidates and strategists might concede they expect things to go rather well for them on July 4. Quite a few will admit they expect a landslide. In Scotland, confidence among the Labour lot is so strong that they have their eyes on a win that would have been unthinkable just a couple of years ago. The Times has reported today that Labour fancies its chances of unseating the SNP’s Westminster

The SNP will soon have more election campaign launch events than predicted Westminster seats if it continues at the rate it is going. The party’s latest launch — the third this year — was held in the luxury Radisson Blu hotel in Glasgow on Sunday afternoon, where party activists and political candidates gathered to hear a series of speeches ahead of the looming general election.  Marketing itself as the party of ‘change’ (Mr S doesn’t have to look far to know where that’s been stolen from), the Nats slammed ‘continuity Keir’ as the ‘most right-wing Conservative Labour leader’ to date. But while the SNP is pledging to ‘eradicate’ child poverty

Oh dear. No one party appears to be enjoying an especially slick campaign at present, but north of the border the SNP seems particularly down on its luck. As Mr S noted on Monday, the Nats are not exactly swimming in cash at the moment — the party is struggling to bring donations in while the police probe into its finances remains ongoing — and separatist candidate have been forced to plead with the public for help with their campaign Crowdfunders. Now the Nats are faced with a fresh problem: where to house the party’s central Westminster team, who are loyally trekking north to help with election efforts. Well, if

It is less than three years since Nicola Sturgeon was taking selfies with Greta Thunberg at the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow. Now in this election the climate, if you’ll excuse the pun, has changed beyond all recognition. Gone is the moral posturing and climate alarmism of recent years as the Scottish parties desperately roll back on their climate rhetoric in the face of huge job losses in Scotland’s energy sector. Black is the new green. Oil and gas companies are no longer climate pariahs. It was of course Nicola Sturgeon back in 2021 who made Scotland the first country in the world  to declare a ‘climate emergency’. We cannot

The Scottish Conservatives were facing a difficult election this summer but SNP leader John Swinney may have thrown them a lifeline. In choosing to attack Holyrood’s standards committee for proposing a 27-day suspension for nationalist MSP Michael Matheson, Swinney has put his party on the wrong side of public opinion. Matheson was censured for running up an £11,000 data bill on his parliamentary iPad during a family holiday in Morocco and trying to have the taxpayer cover it. Swinney claims the standards process was prejudiced by one of the committee’s members and says he will oppose its recommendations. This has been a welcome surprise for the Scottish Tories. A senior

Humza Yousaf lasted just over 400 days as SNP leader. Will his replacement John Swinney get that far? The question arises so soon into his tenure because of Swinney’s decision to oppose the suspension of a former cabinet colleague. Michael Matheson resigned as health secretary in February after the taxpayer was left with an £11,000 bill for iPad data usage incurred while he was on a family holiday in Morocco. After initially claiming ignorance as to how the bill was run up, Matheson later claimed that his sons had hotspotted the data to watch football matches. Yousaf stood by Matheson, calling him a ‘man of integrity’, a locution the opposition