John Swinney: I had lost some generosity of spirit

May is a hopeful month of new beginnings when everything seems to come alive after the dormant winter months and there is a spring in one’s step. It is also a month of political anniversaries for John Swinney. He was elected to Westminster in the Labour landslide of 1 May 1997, becoming the SNP MP for Tayside North. On 6 May 1999, he was one of the Scottish Parliament’s first intake of MSPs. And on 7 May 2024, he was elected first minister of Scotland.

And to follow a theme, had Swinney not stepped up when Humza Yousaf stood down, then May 2026 would, he tells me, also have likely borne witness to his departure from politics.

But some anniversaries were just not meant to be and so this May, Swinney celebrated one year at the helm of the Scottish Government by firing the starting gun on campaigning for next May’s election with the publication of his programme for government which he brought forward by four months in recognition, he says, of the difficult times we are living in.

May was also the month that Swinney first entered government when the SNP won the 2007 election by just one seat. And he remained at the top table through the majority win in 2011, the minority government of 2016 and into the 2021 administration, when he helped forge the ill-fated Bute House Agreement with the Scottish Greens, where he remained until 2023 when he followed Nicola Sturgeon out of power and onto the backbenches where he served for just over a year. 

Despite attempts at reinvention, there is no denying that Swinney is not some fresh-faced politician. He has been integral to the remarkable story of the SNP, a party he joined at 15 and one that he has now led twice. His previous tenure back in the early 2000s ended ignominiously following a set of poor election results at Westminster in 2001 where the party returned just five MPs, at Holyrood in 2003 where it lost eight MSPs and then in the European elections of 2004 where despite reforms Swinney had made to the party, it returned just two MEPs after scoring its worst share of the vote in the European poll for almost 20 years. And while maintaining second place behind Labour, the party was just two points ahead of the Tories. The men in grey kilts came calling and Swinney resigned eight days later.

In a five-minute resignation speech, he said: “I have come to the view that the SNP cannot make the electoral progress I believe is possible if our vital political message is communicated through an endless debate of my leadership. As someone who has devoted all of my adult life to the cause of Scottish independence, that is something I cannot allow to happen.”

He ended by saying: “I am proud to have played my part in the transition from party of protest to party of government.”

It was a bruising affair personally for Swinney but also ushered in the totemic era of Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon which realised that dream of the SNP forming a government which it has now done for 18 years and with Swinney always right there at the side of both Salmond and Sturgeon, moving seamlessly into calling each of them in turn ‘The Boss’.

Now he is ‘The Boss’, bringing with him all the experience of having been finance secretary, education secretary, Covid recovery secretary, and deputy first minister. He has been at the epicentre of the SNP for over four decades, an integral part of the experiment that took a fringe party to the very centre of power and almost managed to break up the United Kingdom. So, it is no wonder that Swinney’s recently self-adopted moniker of ‘Full-On John’, which was presumably some adviser’s idea of how to reinvent one of Holyrood’s longest standing politicians and give him a new gloss, affords some mickey-taking. 

But to be fair, the first minister does indeed seem re-energised. There’s something softer too about him and he clearly has the stated ambition to tackle some of Scotland’s well-recorded problems, with child poverty at the top of his list. But, as we will return to later, the actions of an SNP government that he has been so central to don’t always match its ambition.

Ambition, however, to be first minister was not something Swinney was striving for. After his previous time as leader of the party, he had repeatedly told commentators like me that it was a role he never wished to return to. However, events of early 2024 saw the SNP tear itself apart over old wounds that had gone unhealed from the bitter leadership contest after Sturgeon stood down. That had pitted Kate Forbes and Humza Yousaf against each other, revealing schisms across the party to do with the gender recognition reforms, the Bute House Agreement, and the lack of progress around another referendum. All this coalesced around a deep discontent with Yousaf as leader, revealing a party in crisis. With Scottish Labour looking strong in the opinion polls at the time, something had to give. It was the arrangement with the Greens that eventually brought all of it to a head when Yousaf sacked them from government. The Greens smarted, Yousaf departed, and Swinney was the only contender to take over. He tells me that his party was fractured for a whole variety of reasons but says rather grandly, “I have healed it”.

I ask him if he would have stood in 2026 if this opportunity to be first minister had not presented itself. “I think there’s every chance I wouldn’t have stood. I was beginning to turn my mind to what does lie ahead of me outside politics. I’ve obviously served in the SNP government for a long time [and] had a long government career. I stood down voluntarily as deputy first minister and I could have stood to be first minister in March 2023, but I didn’t think at that moment it was right for me to do it. I felt I should make way for others because I’d been around a long time and was beginning to think about what to do next. I hadn’t come to a conclusion about not standing in 2026, but not standing was certainly in the mix. And then the events of April 2024 happened and well, the rest is, as they say, history. 

The only Labour MP I’ve heard of is Brian Leishman because the rest of them I haven’t heard a squeak from. Where are they? I wouldn’t recognise them if I fell over them in the street. I wouldn’t know who they were.

“I don’t know if you remember but I’d been appointed an honorary professor in the University of Glasgow, and I was beginning to engage on more thoughtful reflections around politics. Indeed, the day that Humza Yousaf resigned, I was in London delivering a speech which I’d been working on for months. It was sort of a reflection on 25 years of devolution. It wasn’t the speech of an SNP voice alone, it was a more general reflection. I was getting into that space of thinking slightly less from the perspective of being a lifelong SNP member; I was thinking more from different perspectives. My head was moving in that direction. It’s funny, when I was sitting at the breakfast table the morning before I traveled down to London to give this speech, [wife] Elizabeth said to me, ‘you know, this is the type of thing you should be doing. Who better, than you; you’ve been around a long time; you’ve done a lot of different roles; you see it from all perspectives.’ And I guess I agreed with all of that and so I probably was in that space of thinking about the next steps. But by the end of Monday, well, everything had changed…

“And interestingly, I think it’s come to me at exactly the right moment in my life because I’m able to draw on a very deep well of experience and perspective to help me through the situations I’m going to navigate.”

There’s no doubting the depth and breadth of Swinney’s political experience but he tells me now that it is a more personal event, the death of his mother, that afforded another dimension to the way he approaches the job of leading the country.

“The saddest thing I’ve experienced in life is definitely when my mum died five years ago in the early days of Covid and I know that for obvious reasons, I did not grieve properly at the time. I was a senior government minister and I had to counsel my own father about the funeral plans that we had for her, a funeral which went from, as you would expect, many, many people to just seven of us at the crematorium, three weeks after her death. I had to explain to him while he was grieving for his wife that as his son, it was my government’s regulations that were doing this.

“That was very, very hard. But also, amid everything that was going on at the time, I didn’t stop to really process what we had gone through personally. And then I think over time, I became conscious of the loss in my life of my mum, and I hadn’t properly come to terms with that. And the more I talk to people in the same situation, I realise that to be the case.

“There’s no rehearsal for how you feel losing a parent and I said when I became first minister that my only regret was that my mum didn’t live long enough to see it. My dad is still with me, at 93, but my mum never saw it and she would have been so proud, so proud. 

“I was sitting in here at Bute House one night before Christmas, just working in the study upstairs, and I went to the window, and they were lighting the Christmas tree lights on the tree in the square, which is on behalf of St Columba’s hospice. My mum volunteered in St Columba’s hospice, and I was completely overwhelmed at that moment when I realised that my mum could have been standing here beside me as first minister, at this window in Charlotte Square, looking out onto this Christmas tree which was there to mark a hospice that she loved working in, and she was no longer here. That was an overwhelming moment, that clear realisation of her no longer being with me. I miss her every day.

Swinney with Sturgeon and Salmond | Alamy

“My mother was a completely non-judgemental woman. I never heard her being judgemental about anyone. She was generous and empathetic. As an example of that, my granny was widowed at the age of 44 and because of life at the time and financial circumstances, my granny came to live with my parents when they first got married. So, from the very start of my mother’s married life, her mother-in-law was there living in the flat. And so, when I say generous and empathetic, you’ll know what I mean. There was a generosity of spirit about her.  Generosity, empathy, [being] non-judgmental, taking people as she found them, I got that from my mum. And I got a huge work ethic from my dad. That’s the combination that I got from them, and I thank them both for it.

“And coming back to what I said to you about this [being first minister] coming to me at the right time in my life, is because it’s allowing me to have more of a generosity of spirit. I think over the years, I had lost some generosity of spirit and in the midst of one of the late night sessions on the GRR bill, I wandered across and sat down and spoke to Willie Rennie. We talked about a variety of things, and I walked away from that conversation thinking to myself, ‘you’ve not been talking to people across the political spectrum as much as you used to’. And I thought back to some of my closest personal relationships in politics and they’d been with people like Annabel Goldie, Derek Brownlee, and Jim Wallace, among others, cross-party friendships, and I had lost some of that along the way, so I’ve consciously, as first minister, tried to address that. And yes, when you see me answering First Minister’s Questions, of course, you see that some people have to get a robust response because they are pressing me beyond the government’s performance, so they have to be addressed in that fashion, but I hope other people feel that renewed generosity of spirit.”

It is Swinney that has mentioned the passage of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill that became the focus of so much consternation, and I ask him if he takes any responsibility for the way the discourse became so divisive and with generosity of spirit so often absent.

“Of course I recognise that, of course I do, which is why, in my just about 12 months as first minister, I have gone out of my way to try to improve political and civic discourse in Scotland. And if you go back and look at the speech I delivered when I accepted the office as first minister on 7 May last year, I made specific reference to the polarisation of parliament and how I acknowledged my part in contributing to that, and I pledged as first minister – and there was some mirth in parliament as to whether I could live up to this – that I have changed and that I would contribute towards creating better political and parliamentary discourse, and I think if I look back at events of the last 12 months when I was elected to leadership of a government of a fractured party, and of leading a fractured parliament, I don’t think many people would have given me much chance of being able to bring my party together, or they might have given me some optimism in bringing my party together, but they wouldn’t have given me much optimism in bringing parliament together.

“But a seminal moment for me was seeing the government’s budget supported by four political parties in parliament, which was an indication to me that the discourse had changed, that there was a more respectful and collaborative environment, a more courteous environment, which enabled four parties to come together to support the budget, because the budget matters. Without the budget, the government can’t stand. So, I felt that was a real turning point in that journey that I recognised had to be done to bring people closer together.”

I suggest the budget passing might not be the balm that soothes the hurt that many women experienced both during the passage of the GRR bill and then in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision in favour of For Women Scotland against the Scottish Government which determined that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refers to biological sex and not certified sex i.e. a trans person in receipt of a gender recognition certificate. But despite best efforts, the first minister is clearly not going to engage in a detailed discussion about who may or may not have been at fault in the debate around sex and gender but reiterates that he believes the government always acted in good faith. It seems pointless to probe further or raise issue with him about the lack of an apology to women who had been critical of the gender reforms that a previous first minister had them branded bigots, homophobes and likely racists, when at the time, he had been her deputy.

Swinney and I talk as he marks one year as first minister and as he prepares to publish his programme for government. I ask him what he thinks he has already achieved during his long political life.

“I think I’ve said to you before, Mandy, that I’ve felt over my political life that I’ve contributed to making Scotland a more self-confident country. And I think that is by far the biggest contribution I’ve made. I’ve obviously been extraordinarily privileged to serve people, to represent them and Thursday of last week was 1 May, the 28th anniversary of my election to the House of Commons. So, it’s been a long time of public service. But then, when I delve below that kind of headline observation about confidence, I would say that some of the reforms around early learning and childcare, which have significantly enhanced the opportunities for children growing up in Scotland, have been part of my contribution in government and the work on eradicating Scottish child poverty, which saw us going into territory that devolved governments had never gone into before, because we acquired powers which I had helped to negotiate in the aftermath of the independence referendum with the Smith Commission. All of these things are factors that I’ve contributed to and have helped make Scotland a better place.

Swinney answers questions in Bute House | Anna Moffat

“In terms of child poverty, you know, I think about my own childhood, and I had a perfectly comfortable childhood, I did not grow up in poverty but when I went to secondary school I saw poverty right up alongside me. I had very dear friends that had a completely different life to me. And that was, of course, back in 1970s. And then I look back over my life, and I think there’s been periods where child poverty and the circumstances of children have improved significantly. Child poverty has fallen, and that is to the credit of the Blair-Brown government, child poverty fell dramatically under them. But then I find myself as first minister being driven by the eradication of child poverty because I think about the opportunities and the support my own children have and have had, and I want to make sure that that can be available for all children in Scotland.”

However, only that morning, there have been newspaper headlines calling for the Scottish Government to do more and for its actions on child poverty to meet its ambitions.

“Well, I read that, but I would look at the comparative position. So the comparative position is that Scotland’s child poverty rates are nine per cent lower than the rest of the United Kingdom, and falling, and they’re rising in other parts of the United Kingdom. So, I’m accepting the challenge because I’m in no way saying there isn’t a problem. Of course there’s a problem. That’s why eradicating child poverty is at the heart of the government’s agenda. But I can take as much action as I possibly can do, and I feel I’m doing that. Of course there are different areas of policy.

“It’s not just about the Scottish Child Payment, which has significantly jumped up, but also about steps around early learning, housing issues, the support and attainment funds that are available to schools. These are all targeted measures to try to eradicate this issue. School clothing grants, they’re all helping to alleviate child poverty. 

“But I’m also conscious of the fact that my challenge has just got larger by the actions of the UK Government’s benefit reforms. By a Labour government. And I’m just appalled by it. I literally can’t think what the point of a Labour government is if it’s not to eradicate child poverty, and yet they’re actively taking decisions, whether it’s the refusal to lift the two-child limit, which of course we’ve opted to now act on, or the green paper on welfare reforms, which, on their estimates, will put 50,000 more children into poverty, which will make an already bad situation worse.

“And if you look at what the Scottish Labour Party offers just now, they offer to just sort of follow along in Keir Starmer’s wake. Where’s the criticism about welfare reform, where’s the radical Scottish MPs down at Westminster standing up to Keir Starmer? The only one I’ve heard of is Brian Leishman. In fact, about the only Labour MP I’ve heard of is Brian Leishman because the rest of them I haven’t heard a squeak from. Where are they? I wouldn’t recognise them if I fell over them in the street. I wouldn’t know who they were. I’d know who Brian Leishman was because he’s stood up for his constituents. But the rest of them, wouldn’t know them.”

I ask him why, after 18 years of SNP government, children are still living in poverty and whether they will need to wait for independence for his party to fulfill its promise of its eradication.

“Child poverty rates are falling in Scotland. They’re rising in the rest of the UK, and we’ve already got a nine per cent gap. It is lower in Scotland because of the measures that we’ve taken. Now I am not for a moment saying that’s job done. It’s not part of my decision-making, but it shows that we’re using devolution to make a difference. The powers that we’re using, we only got because of what I negotiated in the Smith Commission, and we’ve used them at the first available opportunity. We didn’t have these powers in 2007 or 2011 or 2014 – we got them in 2016. They were enacted and we took steps to introduce the child payment as a consequence.”

Others would dispute Swinney’s account of his long-term contribution to tackling child poverty. I, for one, never heard him talking so passionately about this area of policy and indeed, Audit Scotland concluded that his efforts as education secretary to close the poverty-related attainment gap were “limited and [fell] short of the Scottish Government’s aims”.

And on the Scottish Child Payment, which has clear tangible benefits that you would expect from putting money straight into the pockets of the poor, I question why it took so long to implement given it was Scottish Labour that first talked about it and former SNP minister Alex Neil then proposed such a scheme back in 2016. And yet it wasn’t introduced until 2021. Neil has since claimed both Sturgeon and Swinney were against the idea when he first mooted it.
Swinney looks irritated at this and says: “It takes time to set these things up, you’ve got to get it right. But we took the decisions to get on and do it and we did it. Why can’t we just welcome the fact that we’re there now?”

And that gets to the nub. While it may well have only been John Swinney that could have helped bring his fractured party together, it is also the same John Swinney that has been in government for almost all of the SNP’s 18 years, much of that with his fingers on the purse strings and always at the right-hand side and in lock-step of whoever he called ‘Boss’ at the time. This government’s record on delivery is John Swinney’s record on delivery and as I leave Bute House and head back to the Holyrood office, I pass the human collateral damage of where ambition has not been met by action.

And perhaps most telling, the young people who have grown up knowing only the SNP in power and for whom their homes have now become some makeshift village of camp beds, sleeping bags, cardboard boxes and blankets, erected between the pillars of the City of Edinburgh Council, in a city with a housing crisis declared and where already tens of thousands of young children are growing up in temporary accommodation experiencing the full brunt of what it feels like to be Scottish, a child, and growing up in poverty.

What John Swinney expects to do about that in the five years following the 2026 election, should he win it, that he couldn’t have done in the preceding 19 years, remains to be seen. He would undoubtedly argue it is independence that would bring real solutions but for now, it’s the early programme for government that he says will promise delivery and hope.