Keir Starmer’s premiership has taken so many hits in recent days that it is hard to calibrate the impact of Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar calling for him to resign. But this could be the big one. “The leadership in Downing Street has to change,” Sarwar told a specially convened press conference this afternoon. “This isn’t easy and it’s not without pain.” But, he went on, “I have to do what is right for my country, Scotland.”

This is no backbench MP calling for the Prime Minister to resign, no unregenerate Corbynite. It is the leader of the party in Scotland — a country that used to be Labour’s heartland in the not-so-distant past. Sarwar is, moreover, a dyed-in-the-wool Starmerite. Perhaps he has been assigned this task by the men and women in gray suits in Westminster who lack the bottle to do it themselves.

Sarwar certainly has a lot to lose. A year and a half ago, after Labour’s general election victory, he was all but measuring the curtains in Bute House. Having returned 37 out of Scotland’s 57 Westminster seats, Labour was confident that it was about to end two decades of SNP government in the May Scottish Parliament elections. But it was all for nothing. A succession of scandals and U-turns have wrecked Labour’s popularity in Scotland — and Sarwar’s hopes of becoming first minister.

Last week’s opinion polls placed the Scottish Labour Party in a humiliating third, behind Reform UK, and likely to return only 19 out of 129 MSPs in the Holyrood Parliament in May. Put differently, Labour is now trailing the party led by a man who used to be such a political pariah in Scotland that he once had to be rescued by police from anti-racist demonstrators in Edinburgh.

So it is understandable that Sarwar should be taking desperate measures. But has he thought this through? Starmer shows no signs of wishing to go quietly, not least because of the “psychodrama” that would be unleashed by his departure given the febrile state of Labour politics. He is surely right. Is a divisive leadership election, and a vicious internecine war, really the best option for the party and the country right now?

Who does Sarwar expect to replace the Prime Minister, to whom he has been a longstanding ally? Angela Rayner — a politician who is still under a cloud over her tax affairs? Wes Streeting — who was so close to Peter Mandelson that he attended regular Sunday suppers with the disgraced peer and Morgan McSweeney?

Indeed, Sarwar is not entirely in the clear here when it comes to public support for the former US ambassador. Only last year, he posted a picture of himself with Mandelson at the ambassador’s residence in Washington DC, saying: “It was great to catch up with my old friend.”

Sarwar has been pressed from the same mold as McSweeney, who resigned as Starmer’s chief of staff yesterday. In December, McSweeney attended a Christmas party at Sarwar’s Glasgow home along with his wife Imogen Walker, the Labour MP for Hamilton and Clyde Valley and a key figure in the Scottish Labour leader’s operation. Sarwar might not describe himself as a Blairite, but he is certainly a pillar of Labour centrism. He is under assault for this stance from Left-wingers in his party who are naturally angry at the apparent collapse of their political fortunes, not to mention his closeness to Mandelson’s incestuous political nexus.

Perhaps this explains Sarwar’s bombshell call for Starmer to resign. But there is bewilderment in Scottish political circles. A senior Scottish Labour source has told Sky News that the move is “idiocy, immature, incoherent and self defeating. Bad for the country, playing into our opponents hands, and without any idea of an end game.” After all, dropping bombshells can often blow the bomb-thrower to smithereens.

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Iain Macwhirter was political commentator for The Herald between 1999 and 2022, and is the author of Disunited Kingdom: How Westminster Won a Referendum But Lost Scotland. He was Rector of the University of Edinburgh from 2009-12.

iainmacwhirter

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