The award for the most courageous politician so far in this election? Step forward John Swinney, first minister of Scotland and, for now at least, leader of the SNP.
Throwing caution and media scrutiny – not to mention public disapproval – to the wind, Swinney started the first full week of general election campaigning by suggesting he would oppose Holyrood’s standards committee’s recommendations to suspend his nationalist colleague, Michael Matheson, from the chamber for 27 days, after the former transport secretary claimed back £11,000 of roaming charges he had racked up on his iPad during a family holiday.
It was a bold, principled stand for Swinney to take, offering support to a beleaguered friend and colleague. Unfortunately, having marched his troops to the top of the hill, he was forced to march them straight back down again, announcing he would abstain from the final vote, as did all his SNP colleagues. Not a good look when voters are perennially unhappy with the behaviour of politicians when it comes to expenses claims. And Matheson’s case is a particularly egregious one. But party before country, and all that.
Undeterred by this ignominious start to his party’s general election campaign, the first minister then announced that his predecessor-but-one, Nicola Sturgeon, would be welcome to join the party’s campaign efforts. Now, at first glance, this is an odd comment to make.
Sturgeon is, after all, still the subject of a police investigation into SNP finances and she has already been arrested and questioned once, and subsequently released without charge. Her husband, former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, meanwhile, has been charged in connection with embezzlement of funds from the party.
Nevertheless, her own stated willingness to lend a hand in at least some constituencies “from time to time” between now and July 4 plays into the ongoing “Crisis? What crisis?” strategy that she seems to have been pursuing with some enthusiasm since everything went pear-shaped. Sturgeon could have chosen to keep a low profile until all these legal matters had been resolved. She could have decided that discretion was the better part of valour and that every public appearance risked reminding voters of the various allegations that have been thrown around since she left office.
That she remains, at this time of crisis for Scotland’s ruling party, the go-to figure in the SNP’s pantheon of former leaders who can be relied upon to gee up the troops says a great deal about how deep the crisis actually is. Scottish Labour, so comprehensively routed by Sturgeon’s party when she was leader, looks set to make a comeback at the expense of dozens of nationalist MPs, raising a question mark over whether the SNP will be able to continue to govern at Holyrood after 2026.
The shine has come off Sturgeon. The failures in her domestic programme still haunt her successors. But while she may have achieved nothing in office, she can talk a good game, a talent that few in her party have. The problem with inviting Sturgeon back on to the campaign trail is that it looks like a desperate attempt to remind voters of the party’s former glory days.
On the other hand, in a party whose central appeal is to nostalgia and history, perhaps the return of Sturgeon isn’t such a bad idea. Nationalism always looks backwards, whether to famous victories like Bannockburn in 1314, or, more frequently, to famous defeats like 2014. The past, unlike the future, is comforting and predictable.
The SNP is all too aware of the danger that awaits them. In 2017, swathes of SNP voters who had helped deliver the party’s landslide two years earlier, stayed at home, allowing the opposition parties to snatch more than 20 seats from them. Labour increased its tally from one to seven MPs with an overall increase in the number of votes of barely 9,000, half of which went to one candidate, Ian Murray in Edinburgh South. If those who voted Yes in 2014 and SNP since then decide that the party’s current offering is too uninspiring, the same thing will happen again, except on a much greater scale.
That must be what keeps John Swinney awake at night. Sturgeon, meanwhile, finds herself in the relatively happy position of knowing that whatever calamity befalls her party’s MPs on polling day, it is the current leader, not she, who will take the blame. Whether that is a fair assessment is a matter of debate.
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