What happened to the SNP the last time they had an unpopular leader?

The SNP have been here before.  Only in one specific sense, of course – they haven’t been through this kind of financial and potentially legal crisis that a minority of commentators believe to be existential in nature.  But in relatively recent history they’ve chosen an unsuitable leader who the public didn’t take to, and they eventually had to rectify that mistake – although it took a lot longer than it perhaps should have done.

It seems like a peculiar dream in retrospect, but for four whole years between 2000 and 2004, John Swinney was leader of the SNP.  I can recall Professor John Curtice periodically going on Newsnight Scotland in the early years of devolution pointing out something that SNP members simply didn’t want to hear, and in many cases refused to hear – that Swinney was holding the party back, because he was the least popular of the four main party leaders.  He was less popular than Henry McLeish and later Jack McConnell, he was less popular than Jim Wallace, and he was less popular than even David McLetchie of the Tories.  

This was a “does not compute” reality for the SNP, because they had told themselves a very plausible-sounding story of why the Swinney leadership was going to work.  He was far less divisive than his predecessor Alex Salmond and offended almost no-one.  He had a dependable bank manager air about him and thus should be reassuring to moderate voters.  He was like the gentle older brother you looked up to, and thus would be more likeable than machine politicians offered up by Labour.  All of these things ought to have been true in theory but weren’t true in practice, yet the SNP clung to the “ought to be” rather than the “is”, and sometimes even blamed the party’s failings on insufficient unity behind the Swinney project.  There are very clear parallels with the situation under Humza Yousaf, with loyalists telling themselves “he’s an excellent leader, he was great at FMQs, he hasn’t put a foot wrong, he’s been flawless”, etc, etc, etc, etc, and refusing to take heed of polls telling the opposite story.  

There are of course key differences between then and now.  In 2000, the SNP hadn’t yet broken through to become the largest party, and were still a long way behind Labour, so the potential for an unpopular leader to do damage to the party’s support was much less severe.  Swinney’s election as leader hadn’t been by anything like such a narrow margin and hadn’t taken place in such controversial circumstances.  There also wasn’t an obvious Forbes equivalent in the wings, ie. a much more popular alternative leader who clearly should have been elected instead.  Nicola Sturgeon was still too inexperienced, and Alex Salmond appeared to have ruled out any comeback, meaning that anyone who succeeded Swinney might be just as unsuitable as he was.

But eventually poor election results caught up with Swinney, just the same.  Four major elections occurred during his period in office, and all of them saw the SNP going backwards – exactly as you’d expect to happen under an unpopular leader.