Yousaf's a busted political flush with nothing left up his sleeve, writes EUAN ... trends now
Little more than a year after becoming First Minister of Scotland, Humza Yousaf clings desperately to power.
The SNP’s opponents at Holyrood scent blood and have launched motions of no confidence in Mr Yousaf and his government.
Meanwhile, senior figures in the First Minister’s party are, this weekend, searching for a candidate who might succeed him.
Make no mistake, Mr Yousaf is now a busted political flush.
His inept handling of the removal of the Greens from government has left him with nowhere to turn. Mr Yousaf is a political laughing stock, a leader without a shred of authority or credibility.
First Minister of Scotland Humza Yousaf clings desperately to power
And so we should expect, sooner rather than later, a new SNP leader.
Speculation surrounds a number of senior party figures.
There’s a suggestion that Westminster leader Stephen Flynn might bid for the job and appoint a deputy to handle First Ministerial duties until he is able to move to Holyrood.
Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth and former finance secretary Kate Forbes are also seen as potential candidates.
Perhaps I may be so bold as to offer all who wish to succeed Humza Yousaf a small piece of advice: please stop treating Scots with contempt.
This, I’m afraid, is something neither Nicola Sturgeon nor Humza Yousaf could manage.
In the near-decade since the independence referendum, the SNP has utterly failed the people of Scotland.
Despite voters having made their position perfectly clear, Ms Sturgeon was almost pathologically unable to accept reality.
Despite polls showing majority support for the maintenance of the Union, she continued to insist there was a public appetite for a second referendum.
And while Ms Sturgeon treated the majority who did not support her separatist project with contempt, she was equally disdainful of her own supporters.
She took them for fools, repeatedly promising them a referendum she had absolutely no power to deliver.
When Ms Sturgeon said she was stepping down as SNP leader, she conceded that she had become a divisive figure.
Mr Yousaf should have paid close attention to this rare moment of self-examination.
The things that made Ms Sturgeon such a polarising figure were her policy obsessions.
Not only was her monomania on the independence question a huge turn off, but her insistence on pushing ahead with unpopular policies, such as reform of the Gender Recognition Act, set her at odds with many voters.
Ms Sturgeon and her loyal lieutenants dismissed the concerns of feminists who pointed out that reform could undermine the right to establish single-sex spaces, such as refuges.
And they ignored mounting evidence that the prescription of so called
