John Swinney is a 'busted flush'. But here's why SNP should keep him anyway

It would have been more surprising if Jim Sillars hadn’t written his open letter. The former deputy leader of the SNP isn’t exactly known for holding back when it comes to criticism of his former party and so his description this week of Nicola Sturgeon as “Stalin’s wee sister", running the SNP as a "leadership cult”, wasn’t entirely unprecedented.

But though Sillars’s interventions on the SNP – and how those who run it are always mistaken – are entirely predictable, they’re also hugely entertaining. Unwilling – in fact, I think, unable – to sugar-coat his opinions, the veteran nationalist is the Yes movement’s uncensorable Great Uncle, sitting at the table after Christmas dinner, farting freely and telling everyone else where they’ve gone so terribly wrong with their lives.

This week, Sillars wrote that the leadership of John Swinney – barely two months into the job – is a “busted flush” and called on the “tarnished old guard to step aside”. Rather than a period of “reflection”, as promised by Swinney on the morning after the general election which saw the SNP’s tally of MPs sliced to just nine, it should, wrote Sillars, be one of “repentance”.

For a very long time, now, Sillars’s interventions in the independence debate have been tolerated with a kind of “och, that’s just Jim being Jim” response from within the party. But even a batty old uncle can be right, sometimes.

Sillars is entirely correct when he claims nationalists were “misled” during the Sturgeon/Swinney era (when a second undeliverable independence referendum was repeatedly promised) and he also hits the bullseye when he accuses the SNP of losing its common sense in government and “promoting marginal issues… while the real priorities of the people such as education, housing, NHS, infrastructure, were notable only for the staggering level of incompetence with which they were dealt”.

Ticking time-bomb

The latest crisis in the once seemingly-unstoppable SNP has got the lot. There’s anonymous briefing against the new leader, the ticking time-bomb of an ongoing police investigation, and even a cameo role for the boss’s old adversary, former SNP minister Alex Neil who has entered the debate about the party’s direction like Nick Cotton back from Margate to poison John Swinney’s yoghurt.

In the months before the general election, when it began to become increasingly clear that Labour was on course to defeat the SNP in Scotland, senior nationalists consoled themselves with the belief that, even if supporters were to abandon them at a Westminster election, they would return at the next Holyrood poll in 2026.

The extent of the nationalists’ drubbing last week – returning just nine MPs, compared with 48 in 2019 – has changed minds. Increasingly, I find the nationalist politicians and advisers I speak to have decided Labour’s Anas Sarwar will – probably with the support of the Liberal Democrats – be Scotland’s next First Minister.

So isn’t it time for the men in grey kilts to visit Swinney, just as their predecessors did in 2004 when his first period as party leader was going disastrously? In this instance, no. If it transpires that the SNP has more trouble to come when the current police investigation concludes, then better for the party that Swinney – truly, a busted flush – takes the pain over that scandal than they sacrifice a new leader on its altar.