Humza Yousaf: Taking Charge of the SNP

After his ministerial team had been sworn-in, Humza Yousaf took off his tie and ate pizza.

In a whirlwind few days, he had won the SNP leadership, been confirmed as first minister, and formed a 28-strong team including Scotland’s first-ever minister for independence.

The storm around his slim victory against Kate Forbes was yet to subside as she left government in contested circumstances. His first FMQs at the helm, which saw him roundly attacked on his record in government as a minister, had also been disrupted five times by climate protesters.

The new FM left the Scottish Parliament for his official residence, Bute House, with his right-hand man Neil Gray, the newly installed cabinet secretary for the wellbeing economy, and their young families. They placed an order with Domino’s before Yousaf started a game of hide and seek, sending the younger children of both their broods dashing around in excitement.

To calm his four children down before they piled into the car for home, Gray read a story. Pyjama-clad Amal, Yousaf’s three-year-old daughter, sat on her father’s knee clutching a toy rabbit as Gray’s twins Emmie and Freya, also three, poured over the pictures, their elder siblings Isla and Finlay looking on. 

The moment was about as far removed from politics as you can get. It had been, Yousaf said, “an incredible week full of many historic, memorable and surreal moments,” but this one, snapped by Gray’s teacher wife Karlie and shared on social media, was “particularly special”. 

It was a candid insight into who the new FM is when he’s off-the-clock, but many viewers were unconvinced.

“Feels so calculated,” one commenter said on Twitter. “Sorry to be so cynical but I cannot help but think the SPAD [special advisor] army have undertaken polling and identified the persona he needs to create in order to win support.” “Do you always have a photographer and press team documenting bedtime story time for your children?” asked another.

Those reactions could be simple trolling, or they could be indicative of the level of cynicism surrounding Yousaf and his administration. “Scots head for disaster with Humza Useless”, screamed one headline in The Times. “Humza Yousaf’s unimpressive victory”, scorned another in The Telegraph. Leading psephologist Sir John Curtice said 10 SNP seats “might fall to Labour” at the next general election, given current polling, and research for The Scotsman suggested Yousaf’s own Glasgow Pollok seat may be at risk at the next Scottish Parliament vote. “If I was Humza Yousaf, I’d be very worried,” said Labour’s Jackie Baillie.

The 37-year-old is a leader, it seems, who has a lot to prove, starting his term with an approval rating of –7 percent, according to a poll by Redfield and Winton. That compares to a +8 percent score by his predecessor Nicola Sturgeon in a separate Ipsos poll as she departed for the backbenches. And following a ream of campaign promises on the economy, renewables, early years and more, Yousaf’s government has a lot to deliver. On top of this, the arrest of ex-chief executive Peter Murrell over allegations about party finances a week to the day since Yousaf was elected first minister, presents an unwanted headache for the SNP boss. 

“It is a big responsibility,” Yousaf’s father Muzaffar told the Sunday National, “and my only wish is that he does much better than people expect him to do and brings on board more members to the SNP. I think he will be good for the job.”

After more than a decade in parliament and stints in charge of transport, justice and health, working at Nicola Sturgeon’s side, Yousaf has a record that can be scrutinised, and opponents have found it wanting. And as it emerged that Forbes, returning from maternity leave, would not pick up her previous role of finance and economy secretary, there were claims that Yousaf’s promises of uniting the SNP after a leadership campaign which had exposed fault lines over the coalition with the Greens, economic policy and environmental measures had been empty words.

I hope this is no longer a distraction

“Where there are divisions to heal, we must do so and do so quickly,” he had said after winning the SNP leadership contest on 52 percent compared with Forbes’s 48.

But Forbes and her ally Ivan McKee were left out of government, and the cabinet and ministerial team largely packed with Yousaf’s own supporters. “If he had got 70 percent [of the leadership vote] that’s fine,” one SNP source told The Times, “but this is cack-handed.”

The line had gone round that Forbes had turned down a move to Mairi Gougeon’s rural affairs post because, in Deputy First Minister Shona Robison’s words, she wanted “a better work-life balance”. “I think she had reflected how hard the campaign had been for family life,” Robison told the BBC, saying that Forbes had “decided time out of the spotlight would be best”. 

While some supporters informed the media Forbes had told Yousaf “where to stick it”, she distanced herself from those remarks, saying she would “never be as impolite about any such offer”. However, Holyrood understands that it was the need to impose Scottish Greens-backed policies she’d decried during her leadership campaign, such as Highly Protected Marine Areas (HPMAs), which saw Forbes reject the role – and that she did not expressly state that she wanted more time at home. 

It’s something Forbes hinted at in an appearance on the Holyrood Sources podcast, where she said people would be looking to her to “maintain integrity” around the issue. “That stuck in my craw,” one backer said of the work-life balance claim, suggesting it smacked of sexism and spin. “She had been going like mad to be the first minister of Scotland; the two things don’t add up. It’s not been the most auspicious of starts.”

As Yousaf’s first week ended and recess began, there came reports that a group of 15 Forbes-supporting rebels have organised to push for change from within the parliament. Responding, Yousaf said he’d be “very keen to look at” their policy ideas and dismissed suggestions of trouble brewing on the backbenches – to which Keith Brown and Ben Macpherson also returned after losing their justice and social security portfolios. 

Such suggestions, Gray told Holyrood, have been “largely overblown”. “People are ready to get on with the job,” he said.

“Kate has both publicly and in the confines of our first group meeting said that what was said and done in the campaign is done and we are all working together in one team. If Kate herself is saying that, that’s an important sign. I hope others will pick up on that.

“I hope this is no longer a distraction. I hope recess is a good point at which we start to move on.”

While the Bute House Agreement still stands, the shape of the administration has changed, with finance and economy split between Robison and Gray and the social security minister position removed. Responsibility for women was initially absent from the equalities minister’s brief, with energy, transport and net zero split up. Critics have lambasted the lack of business or finance experience in the cabinet and, with a predominance of central belt politicians, questioned the administration’s ability to represent and serve Highlands and islands, and rural Scotland. Gray, who is from Orkney, rejects this. 

“We’ve got a cabinet that has a breadth of experience and life experience beyond the constituency of where they live,” he said. “We are there to represent the whole of Scotland, not just urban or rural Scotland. Of course, we’re going to ensure we do that.”

Forming a team is a test of leadership, said Professor Rosalind Searle of Glasgow University’s Adam Smith Business School. An expert in human resource management and organisational psychology, Searle said that while the normal rules of leadership apply in politics, the complexity of that field means applying them isn’t as simple.

Every electoral event is an opportunity and a challenge

Successful leaders are “able to unify competing agendas to get a job done,” she said, and the manner of assigning political posts is as important as who they are assigned to. “These roles are ways that you reward people who have supported your candidacy and get them into your network, so they are slightly different from other work contexts. 

“How you go about giving those roles and how you show care and respect for your colleagues as the incoming leader can have huge consequences. When you might have had quite an adversarial campaign, how you go about healing those debates is really important for the success and sets the tone for how you want your leadership to be seen.”

Having an overarching “super ordinate goal” to stop people reaching for “their piece of the pie” and give them a shared focus is key to bringing groups together, according to Searle.

The SNP’s main unifying objective is of course independence – a cause which has now been given its own minister, Jamie Hepburn – but the prospect of a by-election in Margaret Ferrier’s Westminster constituency may give Yousaf an early chance to rally his troops in common cause.

Now an independent, the ex-SNP MP faces potential suspension from parliament for breaking Covid travel rules in 2020, something that could trigger a recall petiion and send parties running to capture the seat. Yousaf as called on Ferrier to resign and said he would welcome the by-election. Gray also thinks it would serve his party well.

“Every electoral event is an opportunity and a challenge; an opportunity to set out your platform, your policy, what you stand for,” he said. “That’s also true of other parties who don’t come under the same kind of scrutiny that we do. We’re not afraid of it.”

The news and timing of the arrest of the party’s recently resigned chief executive and Sturgeon’s husband, Peter Murrell, by Police Scotland in relation to the ongoing probe into party finances has brought yet more scrutiny. News crews were stationed outside the SNP’s Edinburgh offices and the Uddingston home he shares with Sturgeon as uniformed officers carried out searches of the properties. 

On the campaign trail, Yousaf had praised an under-fire Murrell amidst questions about membership numbers, saying he had “won countless elections”. Then it emerged the party had spun lines around the loss of tens of thousands of members in an ill-advised denial to the press and Murrell stood down. Yousaf said it was time for the tactician, who he called “an outstanding servant of the independence movement,” to “move on”.

Even before the arrest, insiders feared reputational damage, and aimed to get “back on the front foot” despite one polling website forecasting a loss of 18 seats at the next general election.

“Absolutely, it’s not great,” Yousaf commented following Murrell’s arrest. In Glasgow to promote an additional £1m of funding for GPs to tackle health inequalities, he instead found himself saying he did not “think” it was the reason for Sturgeon’s shock resignation.

“The sooner we can get to a conclusion in this police investigation, the better,” he said, “but it’s really up to the police to, of course, investigate in due course in the way they see fit and appropriate, so we’ll make sure we fully cooperate.”

“There are huge questions I think to answer for both Humza Yousaf and Nicola Sturgeon about what they knew and when,” Labour’s Anas Sarwar said, despite no charges having yet been laid, while Alba Party head Alex Salmond said he was “very sad about what’s happening to [the SNP] and indeed about what it has become”.

It all felt far from the excitement of the Murrayfield Stadium announcement that heralded Yousaf’s victory and a new chapter for the SNP, or indeed the swearing-in of Scotland’s youngest, only BAME and sole Muslim leader. “The empire strikes back,” reported Al Jazeera, saying that “with Pakistani-origin Yousaf in charge at Holyrood and Rishi Sunak, whose ancestors hail from India, leading at Westminster, it could be said that the United Kingdom is blazing a new trail in post-colonial history.”

Watching in the gallery as Yousaf took his oath were some of his family and friends. Also watching was North Lanarkshire councillor Danish Ashraf, whose background is similar to Yousaf’s. To him, the moment read like the start of a new story.  

“Growing up, I only ever saw John Major, Tony Blair, not people who looked like us, from our background, in politics,” he told Holyrood, “and now I’m sitting in the Scottish Parliament with the head of the Scottish Labour party and the first minister both Scottish Muslims. What that does for your aspiration, what that says about us as a country… This is a beginning to inspire a new generation.”