Could it be that SNP saviour John Swinney just isn’t any good at politics? – Euan McColm

A confession: I may have been following John Swinney’s career for the best part of three decades but, until last week, I had no idea he was no good at politics. For years, I held what I firmly believed to be the entirely uncontroversial opinion that, while Swinney might not have had the common touch of Nicola Sturgeon or the Alpha male brio of Alex Salmond, he was a solid, dependable operator.

Hadn’t Swinney, along with those others, played a crucial part in dragging the SNP from the political fringes into the mainstream, turning an unfocused and divided party into a disciplined election-winning machine? Didn’t his more low-key, bank managerly style bring a degree of heft and seriousness to a party led by performers?

Having watched in astonishment over recent days as Swinney sabotaged the SNP’s general election campaign, I can only conclude I got him hopelessly, embarrassingly wrong. The guy’s a liability.

John Swinney has failed to impress since becoming First Minister (Picture: Andrew Milligan/pool/Getty Images)

Baffling decision

Little more than three weeks after replacing Humza Yousaf – and being hailed by colleagues as the man to reunite and revive a divided and depressed SNP – Swinney has angered and bewildered colleagues. His baffling decision to come out fighting for expenses-cheat Michael Matheson has completely overshadowed the launch of the SNP’s general election campaign.

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We know this for a fact because earlier in the week, the big story about the SNP campaign was Swinney saying it hadn’t been overshadowed by the Matheson affair. You can’t get much more overshadowed than that.

Swinney has swerved the SNP minibus across every carriageway and back over the past week. And all the time he’s been traveling in the wrong direction.

After announcing on day one of the general election campaign that he would be opposing proposed sanctions – a 27-day Holyrood suspension and the docking of 54 days’ pay – against Matheson, who wrongly claimed £11,000 in expenses for mobile data run up by his sons while watching football on holiday, and then lied about it, Swinney faced an entirely predictable backlash from within his own ranks.

Only one explanation

Not only had he sent the SNP’s election candidates out to explain to voters – two-thirds of whom think Matheson should resign as an MSP over his actions – why the punishments proposed were too harsh, he’d committed his colleagues at Holyrood to a defence of a man who voters think has got off very lightly indeed. The reason so many opposition politicians have pointed out that, had he been employed in the private sector, Matheson would have been fired and, possibly, reported to the police is because it’s true and we all know it.

Swinney contrived to make himself and his party look even more ridiculous on Wednesday when, after successfully amending the motion proposing sanctions against Matheson to include entirely spurious “concerns” about process, SNP MSPs abstained in the vote. It still baffles to consider that Swinney, having seen the damage Yousaf suffered over his defence of Matheson, decided to spend the first week of the most crucial general election campaign in his scandal-battered party’s recent history fighting his colleague’s corner.

The only explanation is ineptitude. Swinney was brought in to replace a disastrously bad leader but it hasn’t taken long for his own political inadequacies to be exposed.

John Swinney is, I’m afraid, the SNP’s Rishi Sunak.