A Scotsman with a grievance

Desmond Clifford

“It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.”

Ah, “Blandings Castle”, perfect reading for these dark winter nights.  With PG Wodehouse, springtime is only ever around the corner.

The latest Scotsman with a grievance is Anas Sarwar, Labour’s Scottish leader, who this week called for Keir Starmer to step down.  It’s not completely clear whether Sarwar thought he was firing the first shot in a palace coup and that others would follow.

At any rate, they didn’t and Starmer is still there, though any claim that his credentials are enhanced by this Houdini act are surely misplaced.

At this point Starmer is the prisoner of his cabinet and Angela Rayner.  He can never sack anyone again.  It’s hard to see how he can remain prime minister for too much longer.

Like the hapless officer in the “Beyond The Fringe” sketch, Starmer orders others to sacrifice themselves:

“Look here Perkins, the war’s not going very well…we need a futile gesture, Perkins…go to Bremen, Perkins… and don’t come back…God, I wish I were going with you…”

“Goodbye sir, or is it au revoir..?”

“No, Perkins!”

The brilliant Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller, if I remember correctly.

Starmer thinks he can buy time by sacking yet more people who’ve given him unstinting service as special advisers or civil servants.

What an awful trade politics is. And all pointless, of course. Wales has more chance of winning the Six Nations this year than Starmer has of remaining Prime Minister till Christmas.

Very likely, Scotland has a better chance of winning the World Cup in 2026 than Anas Sarwar now has of becoming First Minister.

It wasn’t always like this, and that’s why Sarwar is so pissed. He became Scottish Labour leader in 2021, Britain’s first Asian and Muslim party leader. He was, and is, smart, urbane, strategic and competent.

He is Scottish Labour’s first leader in 20 years who looked credible and capable of ending the SNP’s dominance. Just a couple of years ago that looked a real possibility.

Humza Yusef resigned as First Minister in disarray, the police were all over the SNP, and John Swinney had to be coaxed from retirement to take the job.

Opportunity

The SNP’s difficulty was Labour’s opportunity. At the 2024 UK election they won 37 out of Scotland’s 57 seats, from a base of just 7 seats previously. In Scottish terms, it was a Labour landslide. Given a fair wind, and a helping hand from Keir Starmer, Anas Sarwar looked fair set to lead Labour to power in the Scottish Parliament this year for the first time since 2007.

Well, that was then. After 18 months of Keir Starmer, support for Labour in Scotland has dropped to just 15%.

In a complaint familiar to Eluned Morgan, Starmer has done nothing – dim, zero, nada, squat – to help Scottish Labour. His extraordinary approach to devolution is to ignore it completely, with dire consequences for Labour in both Scotland and Wales.

No one is advising him otherwise. For the moment, no one is advising him at all because he sacked all the advisers.

What we heard from Sarwar was not conspiracy but a cri de coeur. He has nothing to lose.

Sarwar is 42 years old, and in modern politics you only get one chance. Sarwar gets his in May and, if he fails, that’s likely the end of his meaningful career in politics. It’s a cruel fate for one of Britain’s most compelling party leaders.

It was very noticeable that, in reporting Sarwar’s intervention, the UK media had no perspective other than its impact on Starmer’s position in London.

It was argued, correctly for all I know, that Sarwar frightened the horses in Westminster and swung support, for now, behind Starmer. None of the reporters or pundits I saw talked about Sarwar’s real audience – the people of Scotland.

Complete honesty

Sarwar hasn’t the slightest reason to feel embarrassed. He is the one Labour politician who acted with complete honesty this week.

Unlike practically everyone else, he said publicly, to voters and Labour colleagues, and indeed to Starmer himself, what he really thinks.

Most of his colleagues across the Labour Party think it too but, for various reasons, aren’t prepared to say so just yet.

There were some desperate and cloying comments from Labour MPs grabbed by journalists in the central lobby of the House of Commons.  “Keir unbound!” “Keir at his best!”, “Keir with passion and sincerity”, “We’ll see a new Keir from now on!”.

Dream on, comrades. If Keir was capable of change, he would have changed already.

Improvement is possible – look at Kemi Badenoch – but in Keir Starmer’s case you’re asking him to be an entirely different person.

He’s just not very good at politics; it’s a much more common trait among politicians than you might think.

If Starmer was imprisoned previously by his adviser – McSweeney of Macroom, a town I have visited many times – he is imprisoned now by his cabinet.

They don’t owe him – he owes them.

If Labour do as badly in May’s elections as the polls now say, they’d be mad to keep him.

Sarwar will be hailed as a visionary, a small comfort to him as he stands down as leader and perhaps accepts a seat in the Lords from Starmer’s successor.

Sympathy

As for Eluned Morgan, I felt a smidgen of sympathy for her this week.

What was she supposed to do? The list of favours Starmer hasn’t done for her is extensive and I imagine she’ll shed no tears when his time is up. But what would she have to gain by putting herself at the centre of London’s row?

Is Wes Streeting going to give Wales what Starmer hasn’t? Has Angela Rayner taken time from her tax affairs to study the inequity of the Crown Estate in Wales?

Andy Burnham is at least a devolutionist, but he can’t even get to the starting line right now.

A change in Labour’s leadership in London is unlikely to make much difference now in Wales. Scotland is different: Labour has been out of power for twenty years and London is all they have to offer by way of record.

Wales isn’t like that. Labour’s been in government here from day one in 1999 and that’s the record they must defend, for better and worse, in May.

As Eluned has said many times, Keir Starmer isn’t on the ballot paper. She has her own problems, and she’s right to leave London to sort out its own mess.