Stephen Daisley

Seventh time lucky? Richard Leonard, who has resigned this afternoon, was the sixth Scottish Labour leader since the SNP elbowed the party out of power in 2007. His tenure was the second-longest since devolution began, mostly because Labour is in such bad nick north of the border that no one else wants the job. The Yorkshire-born Scot secured the leadership in 2017 in part by allowing the impression to get about that he was a Corbynista. In truth, he hails from the harder edge of the soft-left and in his three years at the helm of Scottish Labour he did not shift the party significantly to the left. He leaves little in the way of a legacy and cannot claim to have changed much.

This is a big deal. The Times says it has had advanced sight of Alex Salmond’s evidence to a Scottish parliament inquiry on sexual harassment and it makes for uncomfortable reading for Nicola Sturgeon. The former SNP leader is allegedly accusing his one-time protege of misleading the Holyrood parliament and contravening the ministerial code. If true, that would be the end of Sturgeon’s premiership. The inquiry stems from a botched probe into sexual harassment allegations lodged against Salmond relating to his time as Scottish First Minister.

Nicola Sturgeon called it ‘not the New Year statement I wanted to give’. The SNP leader addressed the Scottish parliament earlier this afternoon to confirm reports of a new, March-style lockdown across mainland Scotland. It came as 1,905 positive cases were recorded yesterday, though this is likely to be a significant under-calculation as most registry services are closed on Sunday. The positivity rate now stands at 15 per cent, up from 10.1 per cent on New Year’s Eve, and since Christmas there have been 289 deaths recorded in relation to Covid. Against this backdrop, Sturgeon’s government is taking Scotland into the most severe lockdown since the outset of the pandemic.

As political journeys go, it’s akin to Jeremy Corbyn quitting his allotment to grow marrows on an Israeli settlement. Nicola Sturgeon, a lifelong pro-European since June 24, 2016, has decreed that the SNP will vote against the free trade pact agreed by the UK and the EU. This is quite the turnaround. Sturgeon has previously said ‘a no-deal Brexit is a catastrophic idea’, warned of ‘the dire economic consequences of a no-deal Brexit’, described ‘the nightmare scenario of a no-deal Brexit’ and urged the UK Government ‘not to countenance in any way a no-deal Brexit’.

Ursula von der Leyen quoted TS Eliot’s poem ‘Little Gidding’ in her press conference today: ‘What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end, is to make a beginning.’ The free trade deal between the UK and the EU marks beginnings (new arrangements on commerce, fishing and security cooperation) and ends (the single market, free movement, Erasmus), but what we can’t yet be sure of is which category Scottish independence falls into. We might glean the answer from the 2,000-page agreement when the text is published but it is more likely that the question will remain open for some time.

Andy Wightman is — or, as of this afternoon, was — the most independent-minded Green member of the Scottish parliament. A staunch man of the left and pursuer of land reform and tenants’ rights, he nonetheless practises an increasingly old-fashioned respect for opposing views and those who hold them. One of the subjects on which he has sought to keep an open mind is that of trans rights. Under the leadership of Patrick Harvie, a sacristan in the church of identity politics, the Scottish Greens have taken a gender-fundamentalist line with scant tolerance for heretical thinking.

Peter Murrell, the most powerful man in Scotland, gave evidence under oath to the Alex Salmond inquiry on Tuesday. The SNP chief executive (and husband to Nicola Sturgeon) made a number of statements that already are under scrutiny, and others that soon may be. 1) Why doesn’t Sturgeon and Murrell’s evidence match up? Central to the committee’s attempts to shed light on Nicola Sturgeon’s actions has been trying to establish where she considers her role as SNP leader to end and her role as Scottish First Minister to begin.

Whenever the Scottish nationalists start talking about ‘fairness’, you know someone’s getting shafted. SNP education minister John Swinney has cancelled Scotland’s higher exams for 2021. Not out of concern over safely administering the assessments in a socially-distanced manner, but because letting them go ahead at all could be ‘unfair’. Nicola Sturgeon’s deputy told the Edinburgh parliament on Tuesday: ‘Exams cannot account for differential loss of learning and could lead to unfair results for our poorest pupils. This could lead to pupils’ futures being blighted through no fault of their own. That is simply not fair.’ You might remember Swinney from his previous stance on exam fairness.

There may be worse times to slash international development spending than the middle of a pandemic but it’s got to at least be in the top five. The reduction from 0.7 per cent of GDP to 0.5 represents a drop of £4 billion in investment. As Katy Balls notes, the current level was not only a manifesto commitment in 2019 but is enshrined in law, so ministers will have to ask parliament to legislate to allow them to break their own manifesto promise. International development is like foreign policy: there are no votes to be gained from it. In fact, abolishing it altogether would make the Tories more popular with their target voters. Even so, Rishi Sunak is making a mistake.

Sir Keir Starmer was having such a good year. He broke cover early on to attack the government’s handling of Covid-19 and did so by speaking explicitly to traditional Tory voters. He repeatedly bested Boris Johnson at Prime Minister’s Questions and gave a good first conference speech in the job. He brought his party’s poll numbers to within a hairsbreadth of the Conservatives, just as Number 10 descended into the dullest soap opera this side of The Archers. Even that cringe photo of him and Angela Rayner taking a knee in the Shadow Cabinet room — like your parents after listening to Stormzy for the first time — can be forgiven because, bless their hearts, they meant well. Then there was Jeremy Corbyn.

Boris Johnson says devolution has been a ‘disaster’. This has the rare quality for a Boris statement of being true but he, or rather the Scottish Tories, will be made to pay a political price for it. Barely had the contents of the Prime Minister’s remarks in a Zoom chat with northern MPs been reported than Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross was at the Twitter barricades: https://twitter.com/Douglas4Moray/status/1328438555429974018?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Far from subduing the forces of nationalism, devolution built the separatists their own command centre at the foot of the Royal Mile The division of labour here is this: Boris is right intellectually, Ross is right politically. Devolution has been a disaster.