It will be a moment of history if he does, breaking a new glass ceiling for Britain’s Muslim population. But the question hanging over this 37-year-old Glaswegian who has never had a job outside of politics is whether, like Truss before him, he has the political skills and the basic competence to survive.

If he does win the contest, Yousaf will become Scotland’s first truly post-devolution First Minister. He was only 14 when the Scottish Parliament was reconvened in 1999. After studying politics at Glasgow University, he then went immediately to the Parliament to work as an SNP aide. He has been there ever since, elected as an MSP in 2011. He is a creature of the new Scottish polity.

Without doubt, he is a capable media performer. I first came across him as a political journalist a few years ago when I was investigating a group called the Scottish Islamic Foundation. It had received hundreds of thousands of pounds from Alex Salmond’s then-government. Yousaf was just one member who had close links to Salmond’s SNP. It looked like a straight-up case of cronyism to me, but my lasting impression was of his unflustered charm and confidence when answering my questions. He is seen as a nice guy by opponents and supporters alike. 

But there are much more serious questions over his record as a Minister and he has not been quite so good at responding to these. Yousaf has had three big cabinet jobs: in transport, justice, and health. 

As Transport Minister, he presided over a rail system that constantly under-performed (he also suffered the acute embarrassment of being fined by police after he was stopped driving a friend’s car without insurance). At Justice, tasked with taking forward the SNP’s deeply controversial Hate Crime Bill, he failed to foresee the huge flaws within it. More recently, his sub-par ministerial reputation has been cemented at Health. Yousaf’s mantra, as the NHS has gone into meltdown this winter, is essentially: hey, at least it’s not as bad as England. Surprisingly, this has not gone down well with the near half a million Scots currently on a waiting list.

Given this record, there is a sense that over the course of the 4-week campaign to come, something might pop up to derail his candidacy. Yesterday he was facing his first major hiccup. Unlike Forbes, Yousaf has claimed this week that he supports same-sex marriage. However, back in 2014, when the bill legalising it was being passed, Yousaf didn’t take part in the final vote. He says that he was attending to urgent ministerial business. But another former SNP Health Secretary, Alex Neil, told the Scottish Daily Mail yesterday that Yousaf had asked to be excused from the vote because “he was under so much pressure from the Mosque”. It looks as if he is trying to have his cake and eat it.

He may ride it out. He has the backing of the party’s establishment. He is the “continuity Sturgeon” candidate. Yet even by his own admission — he said at his campaign launch on Monday that Sturgeon was “by any objective measure the best politician on these islands” — he appears to accept he is a downgrade on what’s gone before. The question facing SNP members is, if Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon couldn’t persuade Scots to back independence, what chance Yousaf? At a time when the SNP is facing immense challenges on the home front and is totally divided on its strategy for independence, it will require a lot more than confidence and charm to succeed.

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Eddie Barnes is director of the Our Scottish Future think tank.

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