Swinney: I feared for survival of SNP at end of Yousaf tenure

Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney has said he “feared for the survival of the SNP” in the final days of Humza Yousaf’s government.

Former first minister Mr Yousaf was forced to resign after he faced two separate votes of no confidence, one in his leadership and the other in the government he led, following the decision to scrap the Bute House Agreement with the Greens.

Mr Yousaf brought both Green co-leaders Lorna Slater and Patrick Harvie into Bute House and sacked them, but within weeks he had been replaced as first minister by Mr Swinney.

Speaking on The Ponsonby And Massie Podcast, released on Saturday, Mr Swinney shared the fear he had felt about the fate of the party he had been a part of for more than four decades.

“If I go back to that period, which was really, really difficult,” he said.

“I feared for the stability of the government, I feared actually for the survival of the SNP, to be honest, because I thought things were in such a bad place.

“Nobody would have given any prospect that within nine months we’d have members of the Green Party voting for our budget, as well as members of the Liberal Democrats voting for the budget.”

Within weeks of taking office, Mr Swinney was thrust to the head of a general election campaign called by then-prime minister Rishi Sunak at the worst possible time for the party.

When polls closed, the SNP had dropped from 48 seats in 2019 to just nine – relinquishing the party’s iron grip on Scottish politics for the first time since 2007.

Mr Swinney also discussed the period between Mr Yousaf’s announcement of his resignation and his decision to step forward in search of the top job.

On the day of Mr Yousaf’s announcement, he said, he received a call from a colleague urging him to consider standing for leader after he spent a year away from the front lines following a nine-year stint as deputy first minister to Nicola Sturgeon.

“I got a phone call from one of my colleagues, someone very precious to me,” he said.

“They phoned me up in the morning that Humza Yousaf resigned.

“They said ‘I hate to make this phone call to you, but I can’t live with myself if I don’t make it’, and suggested that I should stand.

“I said ‘Well, I’m thinking about it’, and they burst into tears and said to me ‘At the very prospect that you’re even contemplating this, I’m weeping’.”