What has been seen cannot be unseen. Some images are so potent that they become indelibly etched on to a nation’s retina. I think we can say that of the scenes in a comfortable suburb of Glasgow when police raided the home of Nicola Sturgeon, until very recently the all-dominant first minister of Scotland and in times past the most popular politician in the UK, and her husband, Peter Murrell, until very recently the SNP’s mightiest apparatchik and the maestro of its multiple election victories.
Police Scotland used incident tape to cordon off the location and erected a large tent over the front of the house. “It’s hard to get the imagery of the tent out of your mind,” confessed Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s leader at Westminster. Sure is. When some officers were seen in the garden brandishing spades, the casual viewer could have mistaken this for an episode of Silent Witness or Unforgotten. Another police squad searched the party’s headquarters in Edinburgh and removed many crates of material. Mr Murrell was arrested, taken into custody for more than 11 hours and questioned by detectives over allegations about the party’s finances before being released without charge pending further investigations. Party spin doctors sometimes describe events in terms of “the optics”. The optics of this are beyond ghastly for the SNP and beyond wonderful for their opponents.
Rivals are generally trying to disguise the intensity of their glee – gloating not being an attractive look – but they are relishing the humiliation of Ms Sturgeon and her husband. The travails of Scotland’s erstwhile “power couple” are also a source of some pleasure to those within the SNP who have chafed against the ruthless control of their party by a tight clique. Friend and foe alike think we may be witnessing the unravelling of the near-hegemonic power the SNP has wielded north of the border. The more so because these stunning events have come snapping on the heels of a highly acrimonious scrap to succeed Ms Sturgeon. It exposed profound differences, personal and ideological divides that were often viciously expressed, within a party that had hitherto prided itself on maintaining a public mask of iron unity.
There are lots of explanations on offer for why things have gone so wildly bad for the SNP. It is all terribly complicated and at the same time it is really very simple. They first came to power at Holyrood in 2007 when Tony Blair was still prime minister and they have been cocks of the walk in Scotland ever since. Decay is a danger for any party that has been in office for a long span. Sixteen uninterrupted years of power is an extremely protracted stretch, during which they have not been bothered by much serious competition from their opponents. Arrogance, complacency, entitlement, decadence and exhaustion can be among the symptoms exhibited by a party that has been in power for too long.
The challenge of refreshing the SNP proved to be beyond Ms Sturgeon and she was, in many respects, an alpha politician. Beta would be a generous description of her successor. During the leadership contest that he won by a slender margin, Humza Yousaf gave little appearance of being a force for renewal. He was anointed by the Sturgeon establishment and sold himself as the continuity candidate, a pitch that looks even more ill-judged now than it did then. It is a bit late for him to try to distance himself from the old regime.
The SNP’s demands for a second referendum on independence have run into a brick wall, with the supreme court ruling that it requires Westminster’s consent to be lawful and Labour as adamant as the Conservatives that they won’t agree. Mr Yousaf’s performance in ministerial roles isn’t filling Scotland’s voters with confidence that he can improve the SNP’s delivery as a government. During the leadership contest, his principal rival, Kate Forbes, launched an excoriating attack on his record: “When you were transport minister, the trains were never on time. When you were justice minister, the police were strained to breaking point. And now as health minister, we’ve got record high waiting times. What makes you think you could do a better job as first minister?”
His authority is further enfeebled by a fragile mandate. Despite the endorsement of most of the party’s MSPs and MPs, he won only on the second ballot and by a margin of just 52% to 48% for Ms Forbes. That surprised many given that she is a member of the Calvinist Free church of Scotland and her campaign shed supporters when she declared her opposition to same-sex marriage. Perhaps there are more social conservatives among the SNP’s membership than had been previously assumed. It’s more likely, I think, that a lot of them shared her disdain for Mr Yousaf’s “more of the same” manifesto. Scottish voters appear to agree. They have greeted his arrival at Bute House not with bouquets, but with raspberries. Pollsters report that he already suffers from negative approval ratings.
To make things more dire, backers of Ms Forbes are raising merry hell about the sequence of events. They are suggesting that his leadership is illegitimate on the grounds that he would not have won had SNP members known at the time they cast their ballots that the police were going to raid the Sturgeon-Murrell home and detain the party’s former chief executive. Mr Yousaf will struggle to claim to speak for all of his bitterly fractured party, never mind Scotland as a whole. An SNP that is weakly led, mired in scandal and riven by divisions presents a juicy opportunity for their opponents.
The Tories might want to argue that it is very unhealthy for one party to be in power for so long, but they can’t say that when we will soon enter the 14th year of Conservative rule at Westminster. Scott Benton, the MP for Blackpool South, is the latest Tory to disgrace himself. He has been suspended after undercover footage recorded by reporters from the Times appeared to show him offering to lobby ministers on behalf of gambling investors in exchange for money. That follows the Observer’s revelation a fortnight ago that former cabinet ministers asked for up to £10,000 a day to further the interests of a fake South Korean company invented by the campaign group Led by Donkeys. The Tories can’t be critics of one-party dominance in Scotland when they are such a stark example of its corrosive consequences at Westminster.
So few disagree that the beneficiaries will be Labour. Before the extraordinary developments of the past few days, Labour people were increasingly hopeful of making gains at the expense of the SNP. They are even more optimistic now. This could be critical to how the Commons looks after the next general election. Sir Keir Starmer needs a huge swing from the Tories to Labour in England to secure enough MPs to form a majority government, but the gradient of the mountain gets a bit less steep with help from Scotland.
Labour should not waste effort trying to appeal to hardcore supporters of independence, that segment of the public who will vote for the SNP pretty much regardless of what it has done and who leads it. Labour has a decent prospect of profiting from tactical voting by Tories and Lib Dems prepared to lend their votes to Labour candidates in seats where they are best placed to beat the SNP. Labour will make much more substantial advances only by also wooing Scots who have previously supported the SNP. As I remarked when Ms Sturgeon announced she was going, “Soft Yes” voters will be decisive at the next election. They tend to be moderately supportive of independence while regarding other issues, such as competent, clean government, the state of the NHS and the economy, as being at least as important. Sir Keir’s task is to convince them a Labour government is a faster and more effective way to achieve change than voting for an SNP that has lost its way.
A harbinger may soon be provided by a recall byelection in Rutherglen and Hamilton West. Margaret Ferrier, who was elected for the SNP in 2019, was deprived of the whip for breaking Covid rules and has now been sanctioned by the Commons standards committee. Labour is already pouring people and resources into the seat. A win there would provide ballot box proof that it is resurgent in Scotland. Sir Keir’s party has a golden opportunity to project itself as the agent of renewal on both sides of the border. The SNP has not looked so vulnerable in many, many years. What has been seen cannot be unseen.
• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
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