It’s not just the obvious tempting-fate part.
Yousaf himself has been demonstrating his unfitness for office ever since he’s had offices. But that’s not even the dumbest thing about that tweet.
With the shock defection of Ash Regan from the SNP to Alba last week, followed by councillor Chris Cullen, Alex Salmond’s party now has representation at every level of Scottish politics – Westminster, Holyrood and local.
But it still awaits a mass breakthrough, either in politicians crossing the floor or in the polls. In the meantime the SNP is plunging to new lows, recording just 32% in two polls last week, one of which saw them trailing six points behind Scottish Labour.
It seems reasonable to assume that the SNP’s fall is going to continue, with lots more bad news looming in its future – Operation Branchform, the likely humiliating loss of the Section 35 challenge in the wake of Lady Dorrian’s judgement this week, the ongoing ferries and trams inquiries and now the already-damaging COVID inquiry.
The party and its media cheerleaders are pumping out increasingly desperate “please don’t leave us” messaging, ironically only drawing attention to its stricken state.
So the future of the political side of the independence movement appears to be very much up for grabs and open to debate. With that in mind, Wings sat down by Zoom with Ash Regan to quiz her about where she saw it going.
We held back from writing about yesterday’s judgment from Lady Dorrian in the Court Of Session in the hope that if we stared at it for long enough we could get it to make some kind of sense. But it does not. On the face of it, the country’s second-most-senior judge is simply a drooling imbecile.
Because that submission is not the least bit difficult to follow.
As alert readers will have noticed, Wings has been perusing the SNP’s Governance And Transparency Review over the last couple of days, a document which tentatively attempts to discern just how big a mess the party’s previous leadership has left it in.
(SPOILER: a really big one.)
The paper has now also reached the mainstream media.
Wings already touched on that particular aspect of the party’s mismanagement back in August, but in the light of the report now formally acknowledging the problem it’s worth taking a moment to establish just how astonishingly bad it is.
This is the end of Humza Yousaf’s speech to the SNP conference today.
And if you examine what those words mean, the conclusion couldn’t be clearer.
Well, we must admit we didn’t see that one coming.
Although maybe it’s just because over the last few years the concept of an SNP MP having any sort of principles has become so wildly implausible.
The parasite infestation within the SNP has sensed its moment has arrived.
The final act of hostile takeover is almost upon us.
Labour won far more handsomely in last night’s by-election than anyone – and we very strongly suspect that includes themselves – expected. If the swing of over 20% was to be repeated nationwide next year (which it won’t be, but we’ll get to that in a minute), the SNP would be reduced to six or seven seats, as Wings has predicted for a while.
From the abject pit of despair of 2015, when Labour lost 40 of its 41 MPs in Scotland, let’s look at how the party has powered back to recapture the hearts of voters.
Wait, what?
Humza Yousaf didn’t turn up to the count tonight. In the end, even on a dreadfully low turnout of 37%, Labour won by 9,446 votes, with more than twice as many as the SNP.
It was a much worse defeat for the governing party than most expected. There should be only one outcome.
After months of phony war, we’re actually about to find out something concrete about the current state of Scottish politics.
The omens aren’t massively auspicious.
I’ve known my mate Chris since I was five years old and we lived next door to each other in a council scheme in Bathgate. He’s a grand lad, the sort of Rangers fan that you can introduce in polite company, a hardworking, small-c-conservative successful business owner who’d go out of his way to help you and has a few SNP councillors in his social circle.
He isn’t the least bit political. In 2014 he was a soft No whose vote was narrowly tipped by the fact that his company did almost all of its business with English clients and he feared losing them to red tape (and, ironically, English nationalist sentiment) after indy, but after the Brexit referendum he was leaning very much more Yes.
The SNP’s staggeringly incompetent rule since then blew that chance and has pushed him further back into the No camp than he ever had been before, but last night he texted me “can’t believe this actually went to print and came through our door today”.
I can’t say I blame him.
I’ve always been obsessed, in cultural terms, with pivot points: the precise moments at which something significant changes irreversibly.
They can be a goal that ushers in a football team’s golden era – for me, Alex McLeish putting Aberdeen level in the 1982 Scottish Cup final. They can be a twist in a movie, like (first example that comes to mind) the shocking revelation of the bad guy in LA Confidential. They can spring out of nowhere, like the latter, or be something that was visibly on the way but finally crystallises, like the former.
There are some great examples to be found in the world of pop videos, like the one 3m 40s into Pulp’s epic mainstream-career-ender “This Is Hardcore”. But for my money there isn’t one more spine-tingling than this:
(Warning: some adult content.)
Robbie Williams here is played by Humza Yousaf.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
” Jun 21, 19:00
