Scotland’s reluctant new leader didn’t really want the job

LONDON — Just when he thought he was out, they pulled him back in.

After more than a decade at the top of Scottish politics, John Swinney stepped down from his senior government roles in 2023 and returned to backbench obscurity. A year on, and as the summer approached, he was privately considering political retirement and the opportunity to spend more time walking and running the picturesque Perthshire hills that surround Blairgowrie, the village where he lives with his family.

Then everything changed. Humza Yousaf’s shock resignation as Scotland’s first minister at the end of April triggered a swift succession process that resulted in a clearly somewhat reluctant Swinney being dragged back to the limelight.

“I felt I had — to coin a phrase — done my bit,” said Swinney, who turned 60 this year, in his first speech as SNP leader Tuesday. “To find myself accepting office as first minister of Scotland today is therefore, to utter a classic understatement, something of a surprise.”

The man sometimes dubbed “honest John” felt he had no choice but to step into the breach as Scottish National Party leader amid his party’s latest — largely self-inflicted — crisis in its 17 years at the helm of Scotland’s devolved government. 

“John’s done this because the party asked him to,” said a well-connected former SNP Scottish government adviser, granted anonymity along with others quoted in this article in order to speak freely about the political situation.

The reluctant returner

In 2003, ahead of elections to the devolved Scottish Holyrood parliament, then of only four years’ standing, the leader of Holyrood’s flagging opposition Scottish National Party was asked by an STV journalist if he truly believed he would become first minister.

“Yes,” John Swinney confidently replied in that two-decade old interview.

The claim from Swinney, who at that point still had some hair, was an audacious one that didn’t bear out at the time. His pro-independence SNP was roundly defeated by a dominant Scottish Labour Party at that election and lost seats in the process. But he was eventually proved right — sort of — two decades later.

Swinney isn’t new to leadership — or its challenges.

During an unhappy period between 2000 and 2004, Swinney led a party that had yet to enjoy a taste of government or even much electoral success. The SNP lost either seats or votes in all three elections over which he presided.

Following poor results in the last of those, the 2004 European elections, he was forced out by party apparatchiks dubbed “the men in gray kilts,” a play on the U.K. Conservatives’ “men in gray suits” who forced leaders from power, including Margaret Thatcher, when they felt their time had come. 

Humza Yousaf’s shock resignation as Scotland’s first minister at the end of April triggered a swift succession process. | Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Despite being dumped from the top job, Swinney continued to play a key role within the SNP under its new leader, Alex Salmond, as the party won and then kept power from 2007 to the present day, holding senior roles as the Scottish government’s finance and later education minister. When Salmond was succeeded by Nicola Sturgeon — before the pair’s public falling-out — Swinney was appointed her deputy first minister.

Sturgeon would later declare that Swinney, always a close ally, was the “most important person in my adult life outside my husband and family.” 

But despite his prominence at the top of Scottish politics, Swinney made clear on multiple occasions he had no desire to return to the very top.

“There is not a bone in my body that would make me think I want to do that job,” he told the Political Party podcast in 2018, when asked if he would ever want to lead his party again.

He elaborated: “I was leader of the SNP before. It would really be quite an unusual thing to go back into leadership.” 

Eventual change of heart

This stance was tested after Sturgeon’s sudden resignation last year — when many in the SNP saw Swinney as the perfect person to step in as a unifying figure to replace the dominant figure of Sturgeon. But he decided not to run, saying he wanted to “create a space for fresh perspective to emerge” within the party.

“If he’d wanted it, he’d have walked it,” was one SNP MP’s verdict at the time. 

Almost exactly 12 months on, Swinney seemed to have decided — or was persuaded — he could be that fresh perspective after all. 

Yousaf, who presided over a slip in the SNP’s popularity that began under Sturgeon and was exacerbated by a long-running criminal probe into the party’s finances, inadvertently lit a match under his own position when he terminated a power-sharing agreement with the left-wing Scottish Green Party that secured the SNP’s parliamentary majority.

When the Greens made clear they would vote to oust Yousaf in the parliamentary votes of no confidence swiftly called by the opposition Scottish Conservative and Scottish Labour parties, Yousaf opted to quit rather than be forced out.

With the vacancy open, Swinney made clear he had to consider his family. He has a young son and his wife, Elizabeth, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2000.

As he mulled a bid for the leadership, one senior SNP figure after another publicly urged him to stand. He was eventually tempted into announcing three days after Yousaf’s resignation and after much of the SNP had already endorsed him.

“That gives him a lot of scope … he’s got a wee bit of freedom there,” the former adviser said, arguing that because Swinney had come to power somewhat reluctantly, many in the SNP may cut him some slack as he reshapes the party in his image. 

Freedom?

The early indications are that Swinney has used that scope to make relatively few changes to his party — despite the SNP’s currently being on course, according to most opinion polling, to lose a raft of seats in the upcoming Westminster election to a resurgent Scottish Labour.

Before being crowned leader, Swinney held talks with Kate Forbes, a rising star of the Scottish independence movement from the right of the party, who was considering a run for the leadership in the wake of Yousaf’s departure. 

She opted not to stand and instead backed Swinney — and was rewarded with the position of deputy first minister, bringing two of the party’s brighter lights from different political wings together and avoiding a costly, and likely acrimonious, leadership contest. Party chiefs were delighted.

“Swinney and Forbes together is the last thing either the Tories or Labour wanted,” a senior SNP official said. 

Others in the party welcomed the fact that Forbes’ allies — who were often critical of Yousaf — are now in the same tent as Swinney’s leadership, and hope this will unite a party where differing strands of opinion have become more pronounced since Sturgeon’s departure. The Scottish Greens, whom Swinney may need to rely on in some parliamentary votes, were considerably less delighted about her appointment, however, while the SNP’s official LGBT wing has said it has concerns about Forbes’ socially conservative views.

But beyond bringing in Forbes and ditching the largely symbolic role of “minister for independence,” Swinney made no other changes to the governing Cabinet he inherited from Yousaf.

That has allowed the opposition parties to paint the new leader as more of the same, as the SNP struggles to regain its high public approval at the height of Sturgeon’s leadership.

“After being at the heart of every SNP failure for the past 17 years, why does John Swinney think Scotland should accept more of the same?” asked Scottish Labour Leader Anas Sarwar, who hopes to become first minister after the 2026 Holyrood election, as he faced Swinney in the Scottish parliament chamber for the first time Thursday. 

Opposition figures admit the sure-footed Swinney may be more difficult to pillory than Yousaf, who was cruelly branded “Humza Useless” by critics over his propensity for gaffes. But they hope the new leader will prove unable to return the SNP to its former heights.

“It’s hard to resist the parallels between [U.K. PM Rishi] Sunak and [former PM] Liz Truss — where it’s like, yeah, they’re not as s*** as the last person but they’re hardly going to move the dial,” a Scottish Labour official said.

“That’s kind of where Swinney is, I think he’ll be a bit more competent than Yousaf,” they added. “But I don’t think there’s any sense that he’s willing to make the tough decisions and the changes necessary to restore their position.”