The Liz Truss episode is a warning from (recent) history for the SNP – you don’t have the luxury of installing a leader as unpopular as Humza Yousaf and then fixing the mistake later, because by that point the damage may be too great for the leader that follows him to repair

one good thing about the timing of the leadership change is the new leader’s popularity will be tested in the (lesser importance) WM election at least 16 months before the (crucial) HR26 election. That way if the new leader tanks in WM GR we can punt then before HR one

— Scone of Destiny (@SconeOf) March 13, 2023

If you have to go through the SNP losing half their Westminster seats just to realise what the polls are already telling you, ie. that Yousaf is the wrong choice, that’s a hell of a price to pay. Better to get it right first time, and prevent that disaster ever happening.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) March 14, 2023

Last summer, the Tories held a leadership contest in which the polls showed the public had a clear preference between the contenders – they wanted Rishi Sunak rather than Liz Truss.  Tory members made the opposite choice, which perhaps wasn’t surprising given what tends to happen when parties have been in power for a very long time.  Parties that have been out of government for an eternity, such as Labour in the early-to-mid 1990s, are generally pretty disciplined in looking at what will help them connect with the public and doing whatever it takes to get elected, even if that means stepping outside their own comfort zone in their choice of leader.  But after a decade or more in government, complacency often sets in, and there’s a tendency to just stay inside the comfort zone with the choice of leader and to expect the public to learn to live with the person you’ve selected.  That can be a very dangerous game if the leader is not just someone the public wouldn’t have chosen, but someone who polls show the public actively dislikes.  We know only too well that the Tories paid an incredibly heavy penalty for defying the public with their selection of Truss, and indeed that the heaviest penalty of all probably still lies in store for them.

If the SNP elect the unpopular Humza Yousaf as their leader, it will be an act of complacent self-indulgence comparable to the election of Truss, although the nature of the self-indulgence will be somewhat different.  It starts with the fact that Yousaf is the hand-picked successor of the faction that currently controls the SNP, and in that sense the mistake of anointing him can be compared with the Corbynites’ strategic blunder in betting the house on Rebecca Long-Bailey rather than a more suitable left-winger such as Clive Lewis.  They had fallen in love with the idea that they had control of the party machinery and effectively control of the membership, and could thus install whoever they wanted – but in retrospect it’s obvious that they would have been far better off making the hardheaded choice of rejecting Long-Bailey in favour of Lewis.  In the SNP’s case, it’s still possible the current leadership will ‘get away’ with making the poor selection of Yousaf,  but if they do, it will be for all the wrong reasons.  It won’t primarily be about ideological purity in the way that it was with Truss (although admittedly the identity politics divide is playing a big role), it’ll be more about factionalism, and personal loyalties, and even sentimentality to some extent. If a member votes for Yousaf mainly because John Swinney tells them to, ultimately that boils down to a sentimental attachment to Swinney after so many decades of him being around in a senior role.

If Yousaf wins, I don’t expect the wheels to come off quite as quickly as they did with Truss.  But even if he learns from Truss’ mistake and governs circumspectly over the coming months, there’s one ticking time-bomb that he can’t avoid for very long.  A Westminster general election will almost certainly take place next year (most likely in May, June or October), and the SNP would be going into that battle with a leader who has significantly poorer public approval ratings than either the UK Labour leader Keir Starmer, or the Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar.  Given that Westminster elections are ‘away fixtures’ for the SNP where the media won’t allow them to compete with the UK-wide parties on a level playing-field, and given that Labour will have momentum behind them as they seek to eject the Tories from power after a decade and a half, it’s not hard to see where this ends.  In my judgement (to use the late Paddy Ashdown’s favourite pompous phrase), there is a greater than 50% probability – perhaps far greater than 50% – that a Yousaf-led SNP would lose their position next year as the majority party among Scottish MPs at Westminster.

That event would shock the SNP membership to their core.  It might lead to Yousaf swiftly being deposed, and you could imagine that the subsequent leadership contest may boil down to a battle between Kate Forbes and Angus Robertson.  If that had been the line-up in the current contest, Robertson would have been favourite to win, but it would be a very different story after a landmark Westminster defeat.  As was the case for Sunak last autumn, Forbes would be in pole position as the popular runner-up who history had proved completely right.  It would be plain for all to see that ‘continuity didn’t cut it’, and in all likelihood the SNP would belatedly install the First Minister that the public had wanted all along.

But the real warning from history is this: even though Sunak became Prime Minister only one month later than he would have done if he had defeated Truss in the summer, he inherited a completely different legacy.  If he had won at the first time of asking, he would have taken over a Tory party that was only slightly behind Labour in the polls.  He would probably have either maintained that position or improved on it.  Instead, he came in when polls were pointing to a landslide defeat for the Tories, and thus far he hasn’t been able to turn that around, because the damage Truss did in her short period in office was simply too great.

A post-Yousaf SNP could face a similar fate.  The SNP have defied gravity in the last three UK general elections by winning a majority in Scotland, but if Labour return to being the majority party, the new Labour MPs will start enjoying an incumbency boost and they will be very, very difficult to dislodge.  The SNP would retreat to being what they were prior to 2015 – essentially a Holyrood-only party.  Now, in fairness, Alex Salmond took Scotland to the brink of independence in 2014 without much of an SNP presence at Westminster.  But here’s the thing: both leadership frontrunners are now saying that the way in which we almost won independence in 2014 is no longer good enough.  50% + 1 of the vote on a single day won’t do anymore, apparently, we need “sustained supermajorities”.  That being the case, permanently throwing away the tremendous leverage of a pro-independence majority among Scottish MPs at Westminster is self-evidently a luxury we cannot afford – and yet that is precisely what the SNP are flirting with by even thinking of someone as unpopular as Yousaf as their new leader.