Humza Yousaf live updates: SNP leader resigns as Scotland's first minister - BBC News
Humza Yousaf live updates: SNP leader resigns as Scotland's first minister - BBC News
(32 minutes later)
Chris Mason
Scotland's Energy Secretary Mairi McAllan has offered her "wholehearted support" to John Swinney if he decides to stand in the SNP's leadership contest.
Political editor
McAllan says she is "very pleased" Swinney is considering standing for the role.
To
"He is profoundly experienced and a unifying figure with a deep commitment to public service," she has said on X, formerly known as Twitter.
sit in Bute House this lunchtime and listen to the first minister of Scotland
McAllan, who is currently pregnant with her first child, has previously been tipped as a future first minister, with some people expecting her to stand.
was to hear fallibility, human and political.
A man still new to the highest
office here departing; Humza Yousaf tacitly acknowledging his decision to boot
the Scottish Greens out of government last week transformed a bumpy moment - they
were deeply unhappy already - into a politically fatal one. They returned the
favour for their expulsion by saying they’d help haul him out of government
too.
Having lost their votes and unwilling to countenance the support of Alex
Salmond’s Alba, the numbers for Yousaf didn’t add up.
So, he concluded,
better to voluntarily acknowledge this and resign than be humiliated by
arithmetic within days.
All this matters deeply for Scotland’s governance. But
it matters in Devizes as well as Dundee, for another spasm of chaos within the
Scottish National Party, so dominant here for so long, will broaden smiles
within the Labour Party.
Already hopeful of a swathe of gains in the urban
areas in, around and between Glasgow and Edinburgh come the general election,
further turmoil engulfing its biggest Scottish rival is a further fillip.
If Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer can capitalise on this moment, his path to Downing Street
opens up further.
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