Arrogant. Inadequate. Incapable. He is simply not fit to be First Minister: Saturday Essay by STEPHEN DAISLEY
For Humza Yousaf’s premiership, it is five minutes to midnight. He has lost his governing majority.
His Green allies have turned on him as he turned on them.
Douglas Ross is bringing a motion of no confidence and the First Minister’s future lies in the hands of Alba defector Ash Regan, whose October 2023 departure for Alex Salmond’s party Yousaf dismissed as ‘no great loss’ to the SNP.
As the seconds tick down, the SNP’s backroom boys will be scheming and twisting arms in hopes of saving their man, but there are few options left open to Yousaf.
His 13 calamitous months at the helm of the Scottish Government have reached their natural, chaotic terminus.
Humza Yousaf will go down as Scotland’s most disastrous First Minister
There is nowhere for him to go except the exit – and straight into the history books as Scotland’s most disastrous First Minister.
And even if he is able to cobble together a deal to cling on, it will be temporary and will leave him subject to the whims of Salmond or the Greens.
He will be in office but not in power, a helpless deer frozen in the approaching headlights of the general election.
He is going to be flattened, whether by the opposition next week or by the electorate in the autumn.
This has been a week of high drama. The sudden departure of the Greens from the Scottish Government – Grexit, we might call it – was meant to allow Yousaf to take back control.
By getting out ahead of a Green membership vote on the Bute House Agreement, the SNP leader hoped to take the initiative.
Project himself as in charge and decisive. Take the spotlight off his government’s humiliating abandonment of its ‘world-leading’ 2030 climate target.
Instead, as will be all too familiar to observers of his leadership, his attempt to look in control only drew attention to how much he is at the mercy of events.
In this he stands in rough contrast to his two predecessors.
Whatever one might say of Alex Salmond or Nicola Sturgeon, whatever they might say of one another, there was never any doubt who was calling the shots.
They were able to weather so many storms because they possessed that inner steel so intrinsic to leadership and the cautious judgment necessary to wise decision-making. They were up to the job.
Yousaf is not up to the job, never has been and never will be. On his best day – vanishingly few as there have been – he pales against Salmond and Sturgeon on their worst. He is not a leader and soon he will not be a First Minister.
An immense amount of pressure will be brought to bear on those opposition MSPs planning to vote no confidence in Yousaf.
They will be accused of siding with the Conservatives, undermining a ‘progressive’ government and even harming devolution itself.
Of course, this is all so much bluster. The right to withdraw confidence in a minister is one of the most cherished privileges parliament enjoys.
And while all opposition parties will be motivated by politics, and some by revenge, it does not follow that a vote of no confidence is an improper response to the tumult of the moment.
Yousaf has shown himself to be incapable of leading. He has lurched from one crisis to another and made each and every one worse by his involvement.
Every day he remains in government is a missed opportunity to restore good governance to Scotland.
Some politicians are just cursed. Gordon Brown plotted his arrival at Number 10 for more than a decade but when the time finally came it brought with it a global financial crisis and constant political instability.
Every time Neil Kinnock tried to project gravitas he would soon be filmed falling over on a beach or bursting into an ill-advised chant.
It didn’t matter how often William Hague bested Tony Blair at Prime Minister’s Questions, the man couldn’t be trusted to go out in public without making a pillock of himself. (Remember the water slide? The 14 pints? The baseball cap?)
Then there’s Humza. He’s no Brown and no Kinnock. He’s barely even a Hague. But he shares their unenviable talent for haplessness.
Much of what captures the headlines is ephemera. The tumble from the scooter. The Twitter outbursts. The foreign policy faux pas.
There is a slapstick quality to Yousaf. He combines the physical co-ordination of Norman Wisdom with the political prowess of Jeremy Corbyn.
He was at it again earlier this week at the ribbon- cutting for the Glasgow offices of JP Morgan Chase.
In the glare of the television cameras, before the world’s financial press, the First Minister of Scotland struggled to operate a pair of scissors.
Politicians flub photo ops all the time and bad days are a hazard of the job in public life. But in Yousaf’s case, flubbing is the rule rather than the exception and every day seems to bring more misfortune than the one before.
It’s not just that everything imaginable has gone wrong since he became First Minister, but that he seems to be a magnet for rotten political luck.
Unfortunately for Yousaf, and for his government, there is more than misfortune at work and more than ephemera at stake.
The First Minister is not simply unlucky, he is singularly unsuited to leadership, as his tenure has amply demonstrated.
Since he became SNP leader, his party has seen police raids and arrests of its most senior figures; plummeted in the opinion polls; lost the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election; and had one MP defect to the Tories and another become an independent.
The Scottish Government was forced to drop its Highly Protected Marine Areas policy, had to kick its Deposit Return Scheme into the long grass, and lost its court challenge to the Section 35 order blocking the Gender Recognition Reform Bill.
The SNP administration has presided over sharp declines in the Pisa education scores, chronically off-target performance in Accident and Emergency, another increase in drug deaths and the abandonment of Scotland’s ‘world leading’ climate targets.
If Scotland had simply had no First Minister across the past 13 months, it is difficult to believe things would have turned out worse and arguable that they might have turned out better.
In the past year, government has ceased to function properly and while there are various sources of that dysfunction, the common denominator is Humza Yousaf.
To understand how he does politics, it is necessary to understand that the First Minister has never done anything else.
He has no hinterland and no philosophy, no life outside the SNP and no desire to have one.
He belongs to the West Wing generation who got into politics to be in politics, to power-walk through corridors tapping away on iPhones, abruptly joining and exiting important-sounding conversations, all while advisers and reporters weave in and out.
Yousaf began his political career as a bag carrier until winning a list seat in 2011. Ministerial office beckoned the following year as minister for Europe and international development.
It is a post that has no reason to exist in a devolved government and was therefore a perfect fit. If you’re going to give Humza Yousaf a job, it is safer all round if it is a non-job.
Only with his reshuffle to the transportation brief was he given tangible responsibilities, and with them plentiful opportunities to foul up.
Never shy about seizing these opportunities, Yousaf became the first transport minister of the devolved era to be pulled over for driving without insurance.
He was also the transport minister who failed to deliver the Ferguson Marine ferries. The Glen Sannox and the Glen Rosa, commissioned in 2015, were due for delivery in the final months of Yousaf’s tenure in the transport brief.
This was followed by a promotion to the Cabinet as the head of the justice portfolio. It is here where Yousaf inflicted the most grievous harm of his career.
His Hate Crime Act made a radical incursion into the scope of expressive liberty, diminishing the ability of Scots to speak their minds, putting people at risk of a prison term for words uttered in their own home, and disregarding the concerns of women’s rights campaigners that the legislation would criminalise gender-critical beliefs.
The debacle that greeted the Act’s implementation only underscored how ill- conceived and poorly planned Yousaf’s legislation was.
Elsewhere, Yousaf was the justice secretary who tried and failed to incorporate the British Transport Police into Police Scotland.
The justice secretary who misled MSPs on pandemic-era quarantine checks. The justice secretary who demanded a police investigation into a social media video of Rangers players which officers said contained no criminality.
And it was Yousaf who agreed after the Kenmure Street disturbance, which prevented the removal of failed asylum seekers from Glasgow, that it was his job to ‘delegitimise’ the rule of UK law in the name of justice.
That stint at justice was succeeded by two years as Cabinet Secretary for Health. This saw Yousaf step in amid the Covid-19 pandemic and draw up plans for remobilising an NHS put into hibernation while the virus was at its height.
Those plans not only failed to bear fruit, but meant that Yousaf departed the health brief while compliance with key targets such as the four-hour Accident and Emergency waiting time continued to plummet.
That Yousaf managed to leave the NHS in a worse position than he found it was remarkable given he had found it in the midst of a pandemic.
In a functioning political system, being so rankly inept might be an obstacle to continual promotion but this is the Scottish parliament we’re talking about.
If they filtered out all the incompetents, the only people left would be the cleaners.
Yousaf benefited from the pervasive dullness at Holyrood.
It’s hard not to shine in a parliament where most members can’t find the light switch and would struggle to operate it if they did.
When the choice is between darkness and 20 watts, 20 watts begins to look bright.
Yet in the role of First Minister, Yousaf has vindicated his many critics.
His administration has listed from one row to another, fights have been picked that needn’t have been, and the First Minister’s limited political acumen and shallow understanding of policy has routinely brought his government to grief.
Having arrived on a crest of self-confident progressive blather, he quickly learned that running the country is hard and doesn’t simplify at the mere assertion of fashionable nostrums.
Or at least he should have learned that. As it is, he refuses to absorb the lesson.
The more he gets things wrong, the less interested he becomes in why.
He is the quintessential ex-Hutchie boy, too entitled to make an effort, more cocksure than capable, failing his way upwards through Scottish public life.
No more. No more dysfunction. No more drift. No more excuses. We can’t go on like this. Scotland cannot afford it.
He has had over a year now and he’s not getting any better. Even his lustiest supporters and his most loyal lieutenants must face facts: Humza Yousaf is not a First Minister.
He is not a bad man. He’s not out to hurt people. He sincerely cares about issues that deserve to be cared about, from social exclusion and racism to climate change and Palestinian statehood.
In the handful of conversations I’ve had with him, he was warm, witty and charming. The man is maladroit, not malicious. His sin is vanity, not villainy.
Maybe it would be easier if he was a ruthless Machiavelli like Salmond or Sturgeon. In point of fact, he is simply inadequate, arrogant, intellectually shallow and politically incapable.
He is, as his own sister once nicknamed him, Humza Useless.
It would be better if he accepted he cannot meet the demands of his office and made way for someone else.
There are any number of NGOs and causes that could benefit from his campaigning, energy and patter. The office of First Minister is just not one of them.
The good governance of Scotland, the management of public services, the lives and opportunities of the people are too important to allow this cavalcade of chaos to rumble on one day longer than is necessary.
Humza Yousaf has had his chance. He has failed.
For the sake of the nation, he must be removed from office.
