Wings Over Scotland | Anas Sarwar is a winner

Specifically, of the Single Most Toe-Curlingly, Horrifically Cretinous Thing Said In The 2026 Holyrood Election Campaign, And Possibly Any Election Ever, Prize.

We mean, wow. We could easily write a 1000-word article purely on the top 10 things that are fatuously, obviously idiotic about those three short sentences, and so could you. So imagine how embarrassed the poor Daily Record must be today.

Doubly so because in what must be the weakest and most apologetic endorsement in the history of print journalism, the Record actually backs Sarwar to come second.

To be honest, that makes about as much sense as Sarwar’s absurdly clueless claim that Glasgow football fans, if they can’t win trophies themselves, want to see the other Glasgow clubs do it instead. The Record asserts that the SNP won’t win a majority – something which is far from certain – but then raises the prospect of an SNP/Green coalition, then promptly ignores it again and suggests that Sarwar could somehow exert some influence in exactly the same way he’s utterly failed to do in much the same circumstances for the last five years.

We still haven’t quite worked out how the Record is trying to sell the status quo as some sort of “change”. Even if Sarwar took Labour from 3rd to 2nd that’d be a distinction without a difference. If the SNP and Greens can get over the 65-seat majority line, that’s what’ll happen and Sarwar, Malcolm Offord, Russell Findlay and Alex Cole-Hamilton will continue to be the complete irrelevances they’ve been since 2021, watching impotently and whining from the sidelines as the SNP ham-fistedly burn the country to the ground.

If Sarwar came second it’d mean no more than it did when Douglas Ross (remember him?) did it five years ago, and Sarwar is unlikely to have the 31 MSPs that Ross commanded. Indeed, if he has even a shred of decency lurking hidden somewhere in the depths of his two-dimensional plastic persona he’ll resign by next week if Labour have – as looks an odds-on prospect – failed to make any progress at all during his reign, and in all probability continued Labour’s unbroken streak of doing worse at every single Holyrood election since the first one.

(He’s already pulled off what looked an impossible task in underperforming Kezia Dugdale after she’d produced the most calamitous one-term collapse in the party’s post-devolution history.)

Sarwar has been an epic failure as leader by any measure. He’s done nothing to leave the party in better shape than he found it. It has absolutely no distinct policy platform, pledging only to implement SNP policies slightly better than the SNP, which is a bar so low that it only makes it more incredible that nobody believes it even after the slow-motion trainwreck of governance of the last decade.

Sarwar’s only “strategy” was to sit tight and wait for Buggins’ Turn while the SNP squandered its popularity, a plan which was scuppered by the catastrophic Starmer administration at Westminster torpedoing Labour’s reputation UK-wide and exposing Sarwar’s abject indolence in not carving even a glimmer of a separate identity for the North British branch office that might have acted as a partial firewall against the Prime Minister’s toxicity.

(His last-minute ditching of Starmer came across as the desperation it was, and he carried so little weight in Labour that everyone who was supposed to back him up deserted him at the moment of truth.)

But there it is. After backing Labour in 2024 the Record is pretty much stuck with him and has to make the best fist it can of “Vote for our guy to be top of the losers!”, and just imagine the humiliation for all concerned if he doesn’t manage to clear even that low bar and finishes behind the country’s most-disliked party and leader.

As a microcosm of this accursed election, in which voters don’t really want to vote for anyone and nobody really seems to want to win, it’s pretty on the nose.