There is a 1953 Warner Bros short, Zipping Along, in which Wile E. Coyote, frustrated with the failure of his elaborate schemes to kill the Road Runner, opts for a simpler method. He acquires a grenade, pulls the pin with his teeth, and chucks the explosive at the infernal Californian cuckoo. Only he does it the wrong way round, chomping down on the body, lobbing the safety pin at the Road Runner and promptly blowing himself up.
Anas Sarwar has done much the same with his statement calling for Keir Starmer to resign as prime minister over the Peter Mandelson/Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Addressing journalists in Glasgow, he said Scots were ‘crying out for competent government’ and that ‘the situation in Downing Street is not good enough; there have been too many mistakes.’ There had been ‘good things’, he added, but claimed that ‘no one knows them and no one can hear them because they’re being drowned out.’
And then, the most devastating line of all: ‘They promised they were going to be different, but too much has happened.’ Here was Labour’s leader in Scotland not only suggesting Labour was little better than the hopeless, scandal-ridden Conservative shower that preceded them, but speaking of his own party’s government in the third person. It was brutal. It was meant to be. It was, after all, a speech to bring down a prime minister.
Unfortunately for Sarwar, it was the most ill-judged intervention he has made in his political career. For barely had he got the words out than one Cabinet minister after another, including Scottish Secretary Douglas Alexander, announced their backing for the Prime Minister. Thereafter sundry Scottish Labour MPs fell in line behind their real boss: Starmer. Most humiliating of all, the Welsh first minister Eluned Morgan, who had been expected to echo Sarwar’s call for a change at the top, went to ground and hasn’t been heard from since.
Sarwar was left with the grenade in his mouth and it went boom, big-style. Labour MPs are furious with him. They want the Mandelson psychodrama over and done with. Sarwar has added fresh dimensions to it. He has somehow made the Labour party look more divided than it already is, and that’s no mean feat. With Scottish Parliament elections due in May, he has rent open a gulf between his office and Starmer’s, a split that will only add to Labour’s polling woes. The SNP are already exploiting the tensions. Party leader and Scottish First Minister John Swinney has accused Sarwar of ‘naked self-preservation and opportunism’, and repeatedly declined to say whether he believed Starmer should resign. We now have the Scottish Labour leader on the record saying the Prime Minister must go and the leader of the SNP refusing to do the same. That is unsustainable.
The result is catastrophic for Sarwar. Blair Anderson, a Green councillor in Glasgow, puts it starkly in a post on X: ‘Anas Sarwar picked a fight with the weakest person in UK politics and still lost.’ I rate Sarwar for his gumption, spiky parliamentary performances and his seven-year-long campaign to get justice for the families of patients, including children, who died after contracting bacterial infections from the water system of a Glasgow hospital. After years of stonewalling, the health board admitted to a public inquiry last month that there likely was a link between the water and the infections. It’s to Sarwar’s credit that he took up this campaign so early on, with such determination, and fought NHS bureaucrats and SNP ministers all the way.
I struggle to see how he survives today
But I struggle to see how he survives today. How can he go face-to-face with Swinney in the Scottish Parliament? The SNP leader’s every answer will involve reading back Sarwar’s own words to him. How can he go on the doorsteps and the TV debate studios and ask voters to back Labour when he doesn’t back Labour’s leader? Voters tend not to be enamoured of fractious parties. How can he hope to lead a united Scottish Labour party when he himself has disunited it in the most brazen, precipitous fashion? They say when you aim for the king you had better not miss, but Sarwar set his sights on the crown and ended up with buckshot in his own arse. An ambitious politician has to know how to deliver the coup de grace. Sarwar delivered a coup de graceless.
Maybe No. 10 will be open to a hasty rapprochement, with everything forgiven and forgotten for the sake of the Holyrood elections. Get Sarwar to Downing Street, pose for photos glugging Irn-Bru together, and move on. But that’s not going to be credible beyond May. I don’t know that it would be credible beyond Monday. Much as I’m loath to say it, I think the only option for Sarwar now is to take his own advice. As long as he remains leader, whatever good things Scottish Labour has to tell the electorate will be drowned out by the hapless cynicism of Anas Sarwar, who tried to throw a grenade at Keir Starmer’s political career and succeeded only in exploding his own.
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