Rishi Sunak and John Swinney should both stop digging for defeat - Brian Monteith

Despite the possibility of John Swinney facing a late entry for SNP leadership that forces him to face questions he’d rather not answer, there is little doubt he will be the next first minister of Scotland.

He will lead his party into the general election and, unless it is an especially bad defeat, then lead again the SNP into the 2026 Holyrood elections – where it is on trend to take a further drubbing after 19 years of misrule.

Likewise, despite some appalling results in the English council and mayoralty elections, there is little doubt Rishi Sunak will lead the Conservatives into the coming general election. The results were bad, but not, it would seem, bad enough to incite enough Tory MPs to believe they should yet again try a new leader – who although still expected to lose might provide a late rally so the scale of defeat is mitigated.

In limiting Labour to possibly only a single term, by keeping its margin of victory narrow, such calculations are being made.

John Swinney with party supporters and fellow MSPs. Picture: Jane Barlow/PA Wire

So, as both men are doomed to lose, the remaining questions are when and by how much (and in Swinney’s case how often)?

Such outcomes for both would be political karma delivered by the electorate for they will have no-one else to blame, but themselves.

Swinney was a Cabinet minister from 2007 until 2023 and in that time was responsible for some of the most divisive and calamitous policies that have damaged Scotland’s public services.

As finance secretary he pushed the bean-counting, but ultimately costly policy of centralising the police, fire and ambulance services. Swinney was first to turn the screws on local government funding and as education secretary presided over the fall in education standards behind both UK and international measurements.

His unbending support for a state guardian policy finally brought an admission of defeat and was typical of his disdain for parental rights and responsibilities, reflected further in his agreement to our schools keeping parents in the dark about what was happening to their children over gender at schools.

There was so little difference in his advocacy of gender questioning in schools and marginalisation of women’s spaces that he might as well have been joined at the hip to Nicola Sturgeon. Because he was in the SNP Government from day one, always with positions of authority and responsibility, Swinney is more a continuity figure than Humza Yousaf could ever be. And that is why he is, of course, the choice of the SNP establishment, what you might call the SNP’s MacBlob, and has the task of keeping a lid on what the SNP has done to Scotland while blaming over the years, the likes of Boris, Brexit and now Sunak.

That Swinney has been talked into taking on the job of being the SNP leader, receiving his £13,500 “resettlement grant” after retiring as deputy in March last year, says everything about the SNP’s desperate need to appease the Green Party. Fortunately for the SNP, they have shown themselves too afraid of facing the Scottish electorate as the party holding out for the very policies that have helped make the SNP so unpopular.

Standing for what they believe in would put at risk their £72,196-a-year salaries, plus expenses, an index linked pension and parliamentary funding of researchers and advisors. Having brought down Yousaf such realities concentrate the mind and they now will end up backing a government with their bête noir, Kate Forbes, likely in it.

For Sunak, it has probably been the well-earned victory of incumbent Tory Mayor, Ben Houchen, in Teeside that has saved him from a leadership challenge – being the only Tory to win out of 11 mayoral elections. The Conservatives lost the Blackpool South by-election to Labour badly and only beat the Reform candidate by 119 votes. Their 474 council losses put them third behind the Liberal Democrats in number of council seats won for the first time since 1996.

Conservatives do not have to look far as to why the results were so bad. Their supporters are obviously staying at home or voting for other parties, including Labour, Lib Dems and Reform. Only in Scotland, where the SNP are the incumbents, do Conservatives have a prospect of holding seats and possibly winning a few more.

Inevitably then, Sunak’s Conservatives face a crushing defeat later this year, triggering an almighty fight for the heart and soul of battered Tory remnants – the contest likely decided by which few leadership hopefuls retain their seats. A much-touted realignment of the right-of-centre parties around Reform is only possible if it wins new seats in parliament and Nigel Farage becomes an MP, both of which are not yet a likely outcome – but that could yet change if Sunak’s unconservative Conservatives continue to turn off their potential supporters.

Meanwhile, despite the political failure, the UK continues to outperform its detractors – despite or because of Brexit, becoming the fourth largest exporter in the world and the seventh largest manufacturer, with other economic benchmarks such as inflation and growth generally in a similar, if not better, position than those of our comparative neighbours or the Eurozone.

It’s easy to think nothing works and everything has gone to the dogs when in fact it is our state sectors, of both the British and Scottish governments – where the “nothing works” malaise is most evident.

Through their expensive and failed lockdowns, open borders and love of high public spending, the Tories delivered longer queues, failing services and higher taxes – while the SNP has focused on grievance-led independence and identity politics to the cost of everything else.

For both the SNP and the Conservatives, Swinney and Sunak are in a hole. They need to stop digging and abandon unpopular and expensive policies or the next resettlement grant will be theirs.

- Brian Monteith is a former member of the Scottish and European parliaments and editor of ThinkScotland.org