STEPHEN DAISLEY: Baffled Humza tilted his head like a German shepherd trying to do trigonometry
In the ugliest divorce since Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, Humza Yousaf called a press conference to announce the SNP and the Greens were going their separate ways.
Relationships are a fickle thing. On Tuesday, the First Minister said he wanted the Bute House Agreement to continue.
Yesterday he was changing the locks and summoning an Uber for Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater.
Yousaf spoke from Bute House’s Room of Doom, the chamber where Nicola Sturgeon unveiled her pact with the Greens and where she later announced her resignation.
Doom is where his leadership is heading, so the setting was apt.
Humza Yousaf announced he had binned his power-sharing agreement with the Greens at his official residence in Edinburgh
Arctic fury: Grim faced Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater in parliament hours after their pact with the SNP was torn up.
He told the reporters assembled that it was ‘my decision’ to end the coalition. He kept saying this over and over, which made the claim very convincing.
He denied that anyone in his party had given him an ultimatum. Then he said the ‘my decision’ thing again.
You know, I’m starting to think it wasn’t his decision.
As if this tic wasn’t strange enough, Yousaf repeatedly referred to himself as the First Minister or SNP leader.
I just hope whomever he was trying to convince was won over.
Quizzed on his government’s new-found minority status, he vowed to work constructively with the Greens and the rest of the opposition. They’re keen to help him, too. There’s a big door at the front of Bute House they’d like to introduce him to.
A LAS, his commitment to collegiality lasted all of five minutes and he was soon deprecating rival parties for ‘sniping from the sidelines as they often do’.
There is a fine line between bravery and stupidity in politics and the First Minister is in no danger of tripping into the former category. Insulting people who already can’t stand you and hold your political future in their hands is certainly a strategy.
One hack after another lined up to suggest that his volte-face on the Bute House deal left the First Minister looking weak, directionless, not in control of his government.
Quite how this distinguished yesterday from any other day, no one could say.
But these challenges appeared to baffle Yousaf, who responded to each by tipping his head to the side and offering a confused look, like a German Shepherd trying to do trigonometry.
‘This is leadership,’ he yelped, adding that he was ‘confident’ about the 2026 Holyrood elections. He really is the Frank Drebin of Scottish politics.
Every time he tries to sound reassuring, you expect a fireworks shop to explode behind him.
The presser was cut short when Yousaf walked out saying he had to get ready for First Minister’s Questions.
He could have walked out of that room three months ago and still not been ready for FMQs.
Of course, there are two sides to every story and across town the Green parliamentary group were not taking the break-up well.
They had forgone the standard heartbreak process of sticking Thelma and Louise in the DVD player and popping open a pint of Häagen-Dazs in favour of calling a rival press conference.
Patrick Harvie marched his MSPs to the garden lobby to read aloud a statement to the media. Captain Planet and the Planeteers denounced the SNP in the gravest of tones while the cappuccino machine at the nearby coffee bar hissed in the background.
They’re a mardy lot at the best of times but they each had a face like the vegan option at a family barbecue.
No wonder. Having sold out their principles in exchange for power, the Greens now find themselves hated by all sides and with nothing to show for it.
They’re the solar-powered Lib Dems. At least Nick Clegg ended up running Facebook. The best Harvie can hope for is running a Doctor Who fan page on Facebook.
And the cool brutality with which Yousaf despatched them only made it worse. It’s not every day you get taken out in a drive-by scooter incident.
First Minister’s Questions couldn’t possibly top all that. Could it?
Reader, it could.
Douglas Ross got his digs in (‘Have the Greens finally got something right?’) and Yousaf his comebacks (the Bute House Agreement ‘lasted 969 days – or 19 Liz Trusses’), but there was only one man anyone wanted to hear from.
He kept his counsel for half an hour or so, before rising in arctic fury.
Harvie, glaring at the man who had just sacked him, enquired: ‘Who does the First Minister think he has pleased most today?
Is it Douglas Ross, Fergus Ewing or Alex Salmond?
And, more to the point, which of them does he think he can rely on for a majority in parliament now?’
There was no cappuccino machine to hiss here, just stony silence across the SNP and Green benches. It was Holyrood’s answer to ‘Fredo, you broke my heart’.
Everyone to the mattresses. This is war.
