Arrogant. Inadequate. Incapable. He is simply not fit to be First Minister: ... trends now
For Humza Yousaf’s premiership, it is five minutes to midnight. He has lost his governing majority.
His Green allies have turned on him as he turned on them.
Douglas Ross is bringing a motion of no confidence and the First Minister’s future lies in the hands of Alba defector Ash Regan, whose October 2023 departure for Alex Salmond’s party Yousaf dismissed as ‘no great loss’ to the SNP.
As the seconds tick down, the SNP’s backroom boys will be scheming and twisting arms in hopes of saving their man, but there are few options left open to Yousaf.
His 13 calamitous months at the helm of the Scottish Government have reached their natural, chaotic terminus.
Humza Yousaf will go down as Scotland’s most disastrous First Minister
There is nowhere for him to go except the exit – and straight into the history books as Scotland’s most disastrous First Minister.
And even if he is able to cobble together a deal to cling on, it will be temporary and will leave him subject to the whims of Salmond or the Greens.
He will be in office but not in power, a helpless deer frozen in the approaching headlights of the general election.
He is going to be flattened, whether by the opposition next week or by the electorate in the autumn.
This has been a week of high drama. The sudden departure of the Greens from the Scottish Government – Grexit, we might call it – was meant to allow Yousaf to take back control.
By getting out ahead of a Green membership vote on the Bute House Agreement, the SNP leader hoped to take the initiative.
Project himself as in charge and decisive. Take the spotlight off his government’s humiliating abandonment of its ‘world-leading’ 2030 climate target.
Instead, as will be all too familiar to observers of his leadership, his attempt to look in control only drew attention to how much he is at the mercy of events.
In this he stands in rough contrast to his two predecessors.
Whatever one might say of Alex Salmond or Nicola Sturgeon, whatever they might say of one another, there was never any doubt who was calling the shots.
They were able to weather so many storms because they possessed that inner steel so intrinsic to leadership and the cautious judgment necessary to wise decision-making. They were up to the job.
Yousaf is not up to the job, never has been and never will be. On his best day – vanishingly few as there have been – he pales against Salmond and Sturgeon on their worst. He is not a leader and soon he will not be a First Minister.
An immense amount of pressure will be brought to bear on those opposition MSPs planning to vote no confidence in Yousaf.
They will be accused of siding with the Conservatives, undermining a ‘progressive’ government and even harming devolution itself.
Of course, this is all so much bluster. The right to withdraw confidence in a minister is one of the most cherished privileges parliament enjoys.
And while all opposition parties will be motivated by politics, and some by revenge, it does not follow that a vote of no confidence is an improper response to the tumult of the moment.
Yousaf has shown himself to be incapable of leading. He has lurched from one crisis to another and made each and every one worse by his involvement.
Every day he remains in government is a missed opportunity to restore good governance to Scotland.
Some politicians are just cursed. Gordon Brown plotted his arrival at Number 10 for more than a decade but when the time finally came it brought with it a global financial crisis and constant political instability.
Every time Neil Kinnock tried to project gravitas he would soon be filmed falling over on a beach or bursting into an ill-advised chant.
It didn’t matter how often William Hague bested Tony Blair at Prime Minister’s Questions, the man couldn’t be trusted to go out in public without making a pillock of himself. (Remember the water slide? The 14 pints? The baseball cap?)
Then there’s Humza. He’s no Brown and no Kinnock. He’s barely even a Hague. But he shares their unenviable talent for haplessness.
Much of what captures the headlines is ephemera. The tumble from the scooter. The Twitter outbursts. The foreign policy faux pas.
There is a slapstick quality to Yousaf. He combines the physical co-ordination of Norman Wisdom with the political prowess of Jeremy Corbyn.
He was at it again earlier this week at the ribbon- cutting for the Glasgow offices of JP Morgan Chase.
In the glare of the television cameras, before the world’s financial press, the First Minister of Scotland struggled to operate a pair of scissors.
Politicians flub photo ops all the time and bad days are a hazard of the job in public life. But in Yousaf’s case, flubbing is the rule rather than the exception and every day seems to bring more misfortune than the one before.
It’s not just that everything imaginable has gone wrong since he became First Minister, but that he seems to be a magnet for rotten political luck.
Unfortunately for Yousaf, and for his government, there is more than misfortune at work and more than ephemera at stake.
The First Minister is not simply unlucky, he is singularly unsuited to leadership, as his tenure has amply demonstrated.
Since he became SNP leader, his party has seen police raids and arrests of its most senior figures; plummeted in the opinion polls; lost the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election; and had one MP defect to the Tories and another become an independent.
The Scottish Government was forced to drop its Highly Protected Marine Areas policy, had to kick its Deposit Return Scheme into the long grass, and lost its court challenge to the Section 35 order blocking the Gender Recognition Reform Bill.
The SNP administration has presided over sharp declines in the Pisa education scores, chronically off-target performance in
