Yahoo News John Swinney profile: The ‘safety first’ SNP leader
As the last of the SNP’s “long marchers” – those nationalists who played their part in voting for Scottish devolution at Westminster and who’re still engaged in elected politics – John Swinney is unique in his party.
Along with Alex Salmond, leader of the breakaway Alba party but no longer an MSP, and Roseanna Cunningam – the retired “Republican Rosie” – he took part in Commons votes that paved the way for the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999.
He has been a politician longer than any of his counterparts, including his predecessor Humza Yousaf whose self-inflicted downfall led to Mr Swinney taking over the reins as both First Minister and SNP leader.
But the pertinent question remains dramatically different: having been on the political front line for more than two decades and been one of founders of the modern-day SNP, how did Mr Swinney lead his party towards election disaster on July 4?
The SNP walked away from the 2024 general election with only a handful of seats remaining, ending the party’s era of domination over Scottish politics as they gained just nine seats.
Mr Swinney’s party fell victim to a Labour tidal wave, but also to the Tories who picked up support from voters opposed to the SNP’s plan to shut down North Sea oil and gas production.
Mr Swinney had been ushered in as a “safety first” leader after chaos reigned following Mr Yousaf’s resignation at the end of the controversial coalition with the Greens. But he “enjoyed” the briefest of political honeymoons since being nominated as First Minister on May 7.
Rishi Sunak’s decision to call the general election for July 4 caught Mr Swinney by surprise, kicking his campaign off to the worst of all starts. Shortly after the election was called, he was castigated for refusing to back a lengthy suspension from Holyrood for Michael Mathes, the disgraced former SNP health secretary, who charged the taxpayer £11,000 for roaming charges he racked up on holiday. Mr Swinney’s approach resulted in both his party’s and his personal popularity plummeting in opinion polls.
One veteran campaigner said: “On the doorsteps people are fed up. They think Swinney has lost the plot.
“If he thinks that the voters don’t care about issues like this, he is completely wrong. Disillusionment with the SNP is now turning to anger.”
Mr Swinney, who looks every one of his sixty years, is remembered, principally, as Alex Salmond’s first lieutenant when the SNP entered the new Scottish parliament’s temporary home at the top of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile twenty five years ago. The pair were a pretty poor runner-up to Labour, still then Scotland’s natural party of government, in the first election.
With the Liberal Democrats joining Labour in a coalition government – a situation that lasted for eight years – the SNP was shut out of power and looking a long way off from their goal of Scottish independence. In spite of his placid, workmanlike, demeanour this was a cause that has always burned fiercely in Mr Swinney’s heart.
As opposition leader Mr Salmond took the lead against Donald Dewar, the former Scottish Secretary, who had been specially selected by Tony Blair to run what was seen by Downing Street as little more than Labour’s branch office in Edinburgh. That all changed in 2000 when, first, Dewar died of a brain haemorrhage and Mr Salmond, for reasons still not adequately explained, resigned as SNP leader.
Mr Swinney was the natural successor but his term of office was, to say the least, ill-starred. Against, at first, Henry McLeish as Labour First Minister and then Jack McConnell, after Mr McLeish resigned following an expenses mix-up, the weekly joust between the two party leaders lost much of its former lustre.
Instead of heavyweights battling it out, such as Mr Salmond and Dewar, there was Mr Swinney versus Mr McLeish - a distinct drop in star quality, so much so that one sketch writer dubbed Question Time “hamster wars”.
But that was the least of his worries. Under Mr Swinney’s leadership, the SNP lost one of their six MPs at the 2001 general election and notched up only 19 per cent of the vote in the 2004 European Parliament election, one of its lowest ever shares of the vote. It was deemed a disaster and by this time Mr Swinney’s allies were convinced that Mr Salmond was undermining him from Westminster.
It was widely reported that James Bond star Sir Sean Connery, a leading Scottish independence backer and friend of Mr Salmond had made it known that Mr Swinney was too boring to be leader.
The denouement arrived when senior party figures – only half-jokingly referred to as “the men in kilts” – advised Mr Swinney to stand down. He did, only to be succeeded by the man he had succeeded, Alex Salmond.
But now, and proving that there’s nothing new in politics, he is back as both party leader and First Minister.
However, the poisoned chalice he won in 2000 and was forced to give up four years later, was replaced by another of the same.
An SNP era of domination over Scottish politics collapsed when the party was left with just nine seats at the 2024 general election, having previously held 48 since the 2019 vote.
A veritable blitzkrieg of bad government, sleaze and hugely unpopular policies alienated the party and appeared to turn supporters against them. Furthermore, lurking in the background was the case of the Missing Six Hundred Thousand – the massive sum which disappeared from the party’s coffers. It was cash that had been donated by party activists to pay for a hoped-for new independence referendum.
The missing money has been investigated by Police Scotland in what is code named Operation Branchform for nearly three years and Peter Murrell, the husband of former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, was charged in connection with embezzlement. A report from Police Scotland went to the Crown Office, which is Scotland’s prosecuting authority.
Ms Sturgeon herself and Colin Beattie, the party’s former treasurer, were both arrested and then freed pending further inquiries , which the police say are still continuing. Ms Sturgeon said she was certain she had “committed no offence” and insisted: “I am in fact innocent of any wrongdoing.”
Mr Beattie said he would “co-operate fully with Police Scotland’s inquiries”.
The case may be seldom mentioned in polite political circles but according to veteran campaigners, it is constantly raised “on the doorsteps”.
Staunch supporter of Scotland’s independence
Mr Swinney was born in Edinburgh in 1964 and attended Forrester High School in the capital city. He became attracted to the SNP during the second general election of 1974, when the party won 30 per cent of the vote and 11 seats.
Another factor that he has said pushed him towards the SNP was his irritation when English commentators described the swimmer David Wilkie as British when he triumphed at the Commonwealth Games but Scottish when he did not.
Mr Swinney joined the party in 1979, aged only 15, convinced that Scotland was getting a raw deal from the Union and needed to leave the UK.
He graduated from Edinburgh University in 1986 with an MA in politics before becoming a research officer with the Scottish Coal Project. The same year he became the party’s national secretary at the age of only 22.
Within two years he was working as a business and management consultant for a Glasgow firm, where he met his first wife, Lorna. The reserved and quiet Mr Swinney and the outgoing Lorna King did not appear to be the most obvious match.
However, the couple married in 1991 and a daughter, Judith, was born a few years later followed by a son, Stuart.
Later he worked for insurance firm Scottish Amicable but his life was soon turned upside down. First, he was elected the MP for Tayside North in the 1997 general election, ousting Tory Bill Walker.
Even then he was being touted within SNP circles as the natural successor to then party leader Alex Salmond. However, in August 1998 he and Lorna announced their separation after seven years of marriage.
At first they claimed no one else was involved but it emerged that she had been having an affair with a married nursery teacher. Mr Swinney moved out of the family home and his wife broke off the relationship with her lover.
Although they divorced, it did not appear to be a rancorous split, with Lorna stating at the time: “He is still the father of my children and a good father at that.”
In January 2001 the then 37-year-old announced he had a new girlfriend, Elizabeth Quigley, a BBC politics reporter eight years his junior. She promptly moved to cover general news instead of politics to avoid any suggestion of bias and they married in 2003.
Mr Swinney has never been viewed as a charismatic politician and has normally been seen as a moderate voice in the SNP hierarchy but his support for independence has never been questioned.
However, in a long career as SNP finance minister, he boasts that he has successfully got eleven budgets through the Scottish Parliament and has earned the respect, if not the admiration, of his opponents.
But a low point in his political career so far came in 2016 when Sturgeon moved him from the role of finance secretary to education secretary in a bid to stop the slide in Scotland’s traditionally well-regarded education system. He remained deputy first minister.
However, moving Mr Swinney to education didn’t work and in 2020 he faced fierce criticism from parents, teachers and political opponents over what Labour’s Richard Leonard described as his “disastrous” overview of examination results which saw 125,000 pupils having their grades reduced on the basis of past school results.
He survived a no confidence motion in the Holyrood parliament on that issue and survived another such vote a year later over what was described by Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross as the “bureaucratic mess” of a new teaching system.
Ms Sturgeon then removed him from the education brief and made him the minister for Covid recovery – seen by many as a “non job” – while still retaining his title as deputy first minister.
And it was his role in this latter post when Scottish politicians saw another side of Mr Swinney – what seemed to be an out and out apologist for Ms Sturgeon. She has been locked in a bitter personal battle with Mr Salmond, since succeeding him after the failed referendum campaign in 2014.
This included Mr Salmond accusing Ms Sturgeon of being part of a conspiracy against him, which included him being facing trial and being acquitted in 2019 of 13 harassment charges, including one of sexual assault with intent to rape.
Ms Sturgeon denied a role in any conspiracy and there then followed several years of mudslinging between the two along the lines of “who said what to whom and when” and including a complaint that Ms Sturgeon had misled the Scottish Parliament.
Mr Swinney found himself in the middle of this bitter dispute, having to issue statements on First Minister Sturgeon’s behalf.
However, he earned criticism, too, for what he didn’t say when in 2022 Ms Sturgeon forced her controversial gender reform act allowing over 16s to self declare their gender through the Scottish parliament. Nor has he made any public statement about the more than £600,000 missing from the SNP’s coffers.
But the shambles of the Sturgeon period came to a head when after she resigned in 2023, insisting it had nothing to do with the missing cash, and was replaced by “her” candidate Humza Yousaf, her accident prone health minister.
Mr Swinney saw his chance and resigned as deputy first minister almost before the ink was dry on Ms Sturgeon’s resignation letter.
His exile to the backbenches lasted only a year when, again, with what looked like unseemly haste and no opposition he effectively made himself First Minister when Mr Yousaf was forced to resign to escape a no confidence motion after ending the SNP coalition deal with the Greens.
Mr Swinney promised his party and opponents that he would pursue a moderate and voter-friendly policy agenda while also, for the first time, publicly expressing his Christian faith.
The latter explanation may have had something to do with the fact that he made Kate Forbes – in the eyes of many the best candidate to be First Minister – his deputy. She was an already avowed Christian and member of the Free Church of Scotland.
But Mr Swinney’s promises look hollow against his recent behaviour in defending a friend and ministerial ally over the latter’s attempt to get the taxpayers to foot an £11,000 data bill run up by his family on a foreign holiday and then lying to the public about the circumstances.
As a result, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar attacked Swinney for “putting the SNP first … not Scotland”, while Mr Ross accused him of “disgusting behaviour … that demeans the office of First Minister”.
In response Mr Swinney sought to attack Mr Ross for using “nasty, personal abuse” – an accusation that many observers might reckon is rich given the routine approach of SNP leaders when responding to attacks.
