DEAR friends in the capital, I bring news from the frozen north: the Union is safe.
The decision of SNP members to elect Humza Yousaf as their new leader is a blow to the Scottish independence movement. After eight and a half years of Nicola Sturgeon the SNP is now under the stewardship of a man with a net approval rating among voters of a pitiful -20 per cent. And let me tell you, he’s put the work in to achieve that.
Yousaf will become First Minister during a special meeting at Holyrood today. This will be his reward for a ministerial career littered with screw-ups.
Here is a man who, while Transport Minister, was fined for driving without insurance; a man who, after being promoted to Justice Secretary, introduced a Hate Crime Bill that had to be completely rewritten after it stood to criminalise people for using “offensive” language in the privacy of their own homes; a man who, in his most recent role of Health Secretary, has presided over record waiting times and a staffing crisis that has stretched the service to breaking point.
When Sturgeon announced her resignation last month, she was clear that she had become too divisive a figure to win new support for the independence movement.
Yousaf doesn’t merely inherit a divided nation, he inherits a freshly divided party. His victory over Kate Forbes, by 52-48, reveals that the SNP, for two decades renowned for its remarkable discipline, is split.
Yousaf, the continuity candidate who played up his “progressive” credentials, may have won the contest but almost half of the 50,000 SNP members who voted preferred Forbes, a socially conservative member of the Free Church of Scotland who, early in her campaign, revealed that she would have voted against legalising gay marriage.
It is, no doubt, an important milestone that Scotland’s sixth First Minister is from a minority ethnic background. He is also the second Muslim — after Scottish Labour’s Anas Sarwar — to take leadership of a party at Holyrood.
But with his poor approval ratings and his unenviable track record in government, he is unlikely to provide the SNP with the surge of support it needs if it is to make independence the preferred option for a majority of Scots.
