Euan McColm: Big SNP win will be damning legacy of both Sir Keir Starmer and Anas Sarwar

Rewind to July, 2024 and – after years in the wilderness – his party was back in the game, winning 37 of Scotland’s 57 Westminster constituencies in the General Election while the SNP lost 39. Polls suggested Scottish Labour was on track to form the next government at Holyrood.

But there’s been a lot of Sir Keir Starmer under the bridge since then.

As Sarwar launches his party’s Scottish election manifesto tomorrow, he’ll do so as a rank outsider. Current polls show the SNP maintaining a lead of more than 20 points over Scottish Labour. It will take a miracle if Anas Sarwar is to replace the SNP’s John Swinney next month.

And the Prime Minister – the most unpopular in living memory – has played a significant role in creating that situation.

In February, recognising the damage the PM was doing to Scottish Labour’s electoral prospects, Sarwar called on Starmer to stand down. This bold move did not, as Sarwar would have hoped, trigger a wave of similar demands from senior Labour figures.

Sarwar is about to launch a manifesto for a Holyrood election that he’s almost certain to lose. An Ipsos poll published last week had the SNP on 39 per cent with Labour and Reform on 15 per cent apiece.

If things go especially badly for Labour at elections in May to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and a number of English councils then Sarwar will, I think, get his way. Starmer is a weak leader who will be easily deposed when his colleagues decide, as they are likely to next month, that enough is enough.

But Starmer’s departure, when it comes, will be too little, too late for the Scottish Labour leader.

Even before Anas Sarwar has launched this year’s election manifesto, speculation is mounting about who might replace him and his deputy Dame Jackie Baillie after defeat next month.

If John Swinney can secure enough votes to allow him a clear path to government – either alone or with the support of the Scottish Greens – then the view among Sarwar’s colleagues seems to be that he will (not, necessarily, that he should) quit.

When Sarwar does go, it will be impossible to quantify how much blame for his failure should be apportioned to Starmer. Yes, unpopular UK Government decisions have harmed Scottish Labour’s prospects but Sarwar is not without culpability for his current predicament.

His decision, in 2022, to back the SNP’s planned reform of the Gender Recognition Act to allow anyone aged 16 and over to self-identify into the legally-recognised sex of their choosing set him at odds with the majority of voters and a number of his own colleagues.

Sarwar was urged by several female Labour MSPs to oppose the law but instead, he whipped colleagues to line-up behind the Scottish Government, sacking two female shadow ministers who voted against the reforms.

Last year, as the case of nurse Sandie Peggie – who successfully sued NHS Fife after she complained about having to share a changing room with a trans-identified male colleague – made headlines, Sarwar performed a clumsy U-turn on the subject. Had he and Baillie known at the time of the vote on gender reform what they now knew, they would not have supported it. Not only but also: Sarwar had always been a supporter of women’s sex-based rights.

Across Scotland, feminists’ eyes rolled clean out of their heads. Sarwar had been warned against supporting self-ID precisely because it undermined women’s sex-based rights.

The Scottish Labour leader ended up pleasing nobody. The trans activists whose demands he had once championed saw him as a traitor while the women he’d previously ignored saw him as an opportunist. And a gaslighting one, at that.

Of course, the issue of gender reform is not, alone, enough to have derailed Sarwar’s ambitions of becoming Scotland’s next First Minister but some colleagues believe the backlash he faced over his handling of the issue had a devastating impact on his confidence.

“Anas was getting used to decent headlines and good polling,” says one colleague, “and he was totally wrong-footed by the way the gender stuff blew up. It’s like he started to doubt his instincts about everything.”

It’s difficult to see how defeat next month will do anything to assist in the restoration of the Sarwar mojo.

If, as seems likely, Scottish Labour is soon to be looking for a new leader, there is hardly an abundance of choice.

Some members expect Monica Lennon, currently seeking re-election to Holyrood as an MSP for the Central region, to make a bid for the top job.

Lennon undoubtedly has the ambition – and ambition is a very good thing – to go for the leadership when Sarwar decides the jig’s up but whether she has the substance required to make a serious and effective leader of the opposition is another question.

Daniel Johnson, now campaigning in Edinburgh Southern, which he first won in 2016, is another potential candidate while the party’s finance spokesman at Holyrood, Michael Marra, would also be encouraged to make a bid.

I should stress that – to the best of my knowledge – none of those I mention is on leadership campaign manoeuvres, right now.

Theirs are simply among the names being discussed by colleagues who, even before Labour’s election manifesto has been launched, are preparing for yet another miserable, humiliating defeat by the SNP.