GRAHAM GRANT: THE NATS ARE FLEEING A SINKING SHIP

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The great SNP exodus began as a dash for the exit - and now threatens to turn into a stampede.

In their droves, once high-flying Nationalists are heading for the hills before the next Holyrood election in 2026.

A ship that was beginning to list is rapidly taking on water - and a lot of the crew plainly don’t want to stay onboard.

Michael Matheson is the latest big name to announce he won’t seek re-election and will be handing in his parliamentary iPad next year.

That was the device which landed the former Health Secretary in so much trouble when it emerged he had tried to get the public purse to pay for nearly £11,000 in data-roaming charges.

He blamed his teenage sons for streaming football matches during a family holiday abroad – will they be looking forward to their dad spending more time around the house?

John Swinney lavished praise on his old pal - whose job he tried to save - despite the political damage he had caused.

Mr Matheson is now in line for another handsome payoff, amounting to more than £74,506 – a decent sum for a man who tried to take the taxpayer for a ride.

The money is on top of a £12,712 pay-out for ‘loss of ministerial office’ he received after resigning in disgrace from the health brief in February last year.

He will be comfortably off, which is more than can be said for the NHS he failed to fix, which is now facing an existential crisis amid gargantuan waiting lists and burnt-out medics.

It’s true that few of those planning their escape could be accused of being intellectual heavyweights - but they were the best the party had to offer.

The talent pool was shallow but now it’s being drained to the dregs - around a third of Nationalist MSPs have so far confirmed they will not fight the Holyrood election.

Some 21 sitting MSPs are in the queue to quit, including former First Ministers Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf - and 14 of them are women.

Ms Sturgeon is the highest-profile SNP figure to reveal she won’t be sticking around - and last week she was reduced to an unedifying bout of self-publicity on Instagram to mark the announcement.

Doubtless Mr Swinney would be leaving the building, too, if he hadn’t been left in charge when Mr Yousaf threw in the towel.

When he was asked yesterday whether the SNP had a women problem - given the high proportion of female MSPs gearing up to quit parliament – Mr Swinney claimed the issue was wider than just his own party.

He said: ‘I think there are some big issues about how women feel in public life because of the amount of abuse that’s hurled about.

‘We had a classic example of it, last week, from Russell Findlay at First Minister’s Questions, where he used four questions to, basically, hurl abuse at a woman.’

The Scottish Tory leader used his questions at the weekly session last Thursday to attack the record of Ms Sturgeon, which he described (with some understatement) as a ‘vast back catalogue of failure’.

Is Mr Swinney arguing that if you’re a woman in politics - even if you’re meant to be running the country - you should expect to be insulated from criticism, and anyone with the temerity to question your record is a misogynist?

Clearly, it hadn’t occurred to Mr Swinney that his old boss might be calling it a day for other reasons.

She remains under investigation as part of Police Scotland’s £2.1million Operation Branchform probe into the SNP’s expenses - and the glory days when she could fill a stadium with adoring supporters are long gone.

After stepping down, she wasted no time raking in cash for book reviews and an advance for penning a forthcoming memoir – time she could have spent (less lucratively) in her Glasgow Southside constituency.

As well as Ms Sturgeon and Mr Yousaf, current cabinet secretaries Shona Robison, Fiona Hyslop and Mairi Gougeon will stand down, as will junior ministers Natalie Don-Innes, Graeme Dey, Richard Lochhead and Christina McKelvie.

Meanwhile, the party’s chief whip in Westminster, Kirsty Blackman, has claimed there’s a ‘huge amount of talent among proposed candidates’.

Among them is David Mitchell, the SNP candidate for Falkirk East and Linlithgow, a former modern studies teacher who’s standing on a platform of being ‘serious about independence’ – well, someone in the party has to be.

His new masters only ever pay lip service to the idea nowadays, and the rhetoric will ratchet up as we get closer to the election – but no one can doubt it’s all the SNP cares about.

Mr Mitchell is in favour of ‘governing Scotland effectively with the limited powers of devolution’ – with the ultimate aim of scrapping devolution, in favour of breaking up Britain.

That said, he deserves credit for the idea of effective governance – a novel concept for SNP hierarchs.

More of the same from the new crop of separatists would be unsurprising, but it’s dispiriting to read a pitch from a supposedly bright young candidate which reads like it’s been churned out by AI in the SNP’s headquarters.

Mind you, they have other problems to contend with - now that membership has plunged to its lowest in a decade after tens of thousands of supporters abandoned the party.

Internal documents revealed in January suggest its membership is set to plummet to about 60,000 for the first time since the referendum.

That figure is more than 65,000 short of the 125,000-strong membership the SNP boasted of in 2019 - a fall of more than half.

It isn’t hard to see why so many have turned their backs on a broken party which is dedicated to fighting tooth and nail for a cause that remains firmly beyond its grasp.

Reflecting on the imminent departure of so many of her colleagues yesterday, Ms Blackman said: ‘I’ve seen the list of proposed candidates, and there is a huge amount of talent on there, and actually, I don’t feel annoyed at people who are choosing to stand down.

‘If you’ve had 27 years in public life, it takes a massive personal drain.’

It’s also a drain for the voters who had to put up with their cack-handedness for so long.

Now we’re having to fork out for Mr Matheson and all the others who made such a spectacular mess of the job they were paid to do.

For Unionists, there is some cause for quiet celebration that so many deadwood MSPs and failed ministers are preparing to quit.

The only certainty is that their replacements will be just as underwhelming – clone-like, pumping out the same tired old propaganda, and never departing from the spin doctors’ script.

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2025-03-17T22:08:30Z