Anas Sarwar is a winner
Specifically, of the Single Most Toe-Curlingly, Face-Palmingly Cretinous Thing Said In The 2026 Holyrood Election Campaign, And Possibly Any Election Ever, Prize.
We mean, wow. We could easily write a 1000-word article purely on the top 10 things that are fatuously, obviously idiotic about those three short sentences, and so could you. So imagine how embarrassed the poor Daily Record must be today.
Doubly so because in what must be the weakest and most apologetic endorsement in the history of print journalism, the Record actually backs Sarwar to come second.
To be honest, that makes about as much sense as Sarwar’s absurdly clueless claim that Glasgow football fans, if they can’t win trophies themselves, want to see the other Glasgow clubs do it instead – a beamer right up there with John Swinney claiming to be a massive Hearts fan then not being able to name their captain, or David Cameron getting Aston Villa mixed up with West Ham.
The Record asserts that the SNP won’t win a majority – something which is far from certain – then raises the prospect of an SNP/Green coalition, then promptly ignores it again and suggests that Sarwar could somehow exert some influence over that government in exactly the same way he’s utterly failed to do in much the same circumstances for the last five years.
We still haven’t quite worked out how the Record is straining with a straight face to sell the status quo as some sort of “change”. Even if Sarwar took Labour from 3rd to 2nd that’d be a distinction without a difference. If the SNP and Greens can get over the 65-seat majority line, that’s what’ll happen and Sarwar, Malcolm Offord, Russell Findlay and Alex Cole-Hamilton will continue to be the complete irrelevances they’ve been since 2021, watching impotently and whining from the sidelines as the SNP ham-fistedly burn the country to the ground.
If Sarwar came second it’d mean no more than it did when Douglas Ross (remember him?) did it five years ago, and Sarwar is unlikely to have the 31 MSPs that Ross commanded. Indeed, if he has even a shred of decency lurking hidden somewhere in the depths of his two-dimensional plastic persona he’ll resign by next week if Labour have – as looks an odds-on prospect – failed to make any progress at all during his reign, and in all probability continued Labour’s unbroken streak of doing worse at every single Holyrood election since the first one.
(He’s already pulled off what looked an impossible task in underperforming Kezia Dugdale after she’d produced the most calamitous one-term collapse in the party’s post-devolution history.)
Sarwar has been an epic failure as leader by any measure. He’s done nothing to leave the party in better shape than he found it. It has absolutely no distinct policy platform, pledging only to implement SNP policies slightly better than the SNP, which is a bar so low that it only makes it more incredible that nobody believes it even after the slow-motion trainwreck of governance of the last decade.
Sarwar’s only “strategy” was to sit tight and wait for Buggins’ Turn while the SNP squandered its popularity, a plan which was scuppered by the catastrophic Starmer administration at Westminster torpedoing Labour’s reputation UK-wide and exposing Sarwar’s abject indolence in not carving even a glimmer of a separate identity for the North British branch office that might have acted as a partial firewall against the Prime Minister’s all-consuming toxicity.
(His last-minute ditching of Starmer came across as the desperation it was, and he carried so little weight in Labour that everyone who was supposed to back him up deserted him at the moment of truth.)
But there it is. After backing Labour in 2024 the Record is pretty much stuck with him and has to make the best fist it can of “Vote for our guy to be top of the losers!”, and just imagine the humiliation for all concerned if he doesn’t manage to clear even that low bar and finishes behind the country’s most-disliked party and leader.
As a microcosm of this accursed election, in which voters don’t really want to vote for anyone and nobody really seems to want to win, it’s pretty on the nose.
Anas desperate to be considered relevant, poor wee arsehole naebody likes or listens to
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When Sarwar gets the Order of The Boot, please can we have the promiscuous political party hopping tart, James Kelly from Scot Goes Gravy Train as the First Minger of Scotland?
Stuart Campbell’s stalker has all the qualities needed to replace Anas Sarwar.
Jimmy The Janny can WEAVE funds raised for explicit purposes of running his blog and transform those RINGFENCED blog funds into his magic holiday fund better than Nicola’s Baird. Jimmy can also whinge for the Olympics each time he gets booted out of one political party to another. So he has the Sturgeon sport of throwing friends under a bus up to prize winning standards.
Best of all, Jimmy The Janny just does not understand how his broadcast from Clarty Living Room Midden HQ that we should all vote “SNP 1 + 2” is letting blue and red tories in on the List.
Stuart, perhaps if you did a post with crayons, Jimmy the Janny might understand the D’Hont system?
BEST OF ALL, JAMES KELLY KNOWS HOW TO FIB… HIS VERY LAST EVER FUNDRAISER HASE ENDED. YET HE IS AT IT AGAIN. ANOTHER FUNDRAISER. BUT THIS TIME HE IS BUYING A POLE.
Though that purchase might mean he has to go on holiday to Poland to collect the pole he is currently fundraising for. Again. After he explicitly promised NEVER to run another fundraiser.
That would be the Glasgow banter. And The Heart of Midlothian.