John Swinney: I have ‘healed’ the SNP

John Swinney has claimed to have successfully “healed” the SNP 12 months after becoming leader.

Speaking exclusively to Holyrood, the first minister said that when he took office last year, he was at the helm of a “fractured party” and a “fractured parliament”.

But after a year which has seen the SNP stabilise in the polls and now looking set to win next year’s election, he said: “I have healed it.”

Swinney became the leader of the party for the second time at the start of May last year, following the resignation of Humza Yousaf.

Yousaf had taken on the leadership during a tumultuous time for the party, sparked partly by the infighting caused by the bruising battle between him, Kate Forbes and Ash Regan to succeed Nicola Sturgeon.

When Yousaf resigned after scrapping the Bute House Agreement with the Scottish Greens, Swinney took over the reins uncontested.

Reflecting on becoming first minister even though he had been contemplating standing down in 2026, Swinney said the role had “come to me at exactly the right moment in my life”.

“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,” he said.

He said he had more “generosity of spirit” now than when he was previously in government, driven in part by a realisation that he had “not been talking to people across the political spectrum as much as [he] used to”.

Explaining he’d made an effort to reach across the aisle, he added: “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.”

In a wide-ranging interview, he also opened up about how the death of his mother in 2020 had impacted him.

He said: “Amid everything that was going on at the time [with the Covid pandemic], 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.”

Swinney also hit out at Scottish Labour MPs for seeming to “follow along in Keir Starmer’s wake”.

He added: “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.”