Euan McColm: Greens will squeeze as much as they can get out of John Swinney and the SNP

Across the political spectrum – from senior Tories to former SNP Government ministers – they came together to celebrate a moment rich in pathos.

Standing on the stage in the Royal Highland Centre, beside a man dressed as a Guga – the chick of the Northern Gannet (in case your ornithological knowledge is rusty) – former cabinet secretary Angus Robertson had just lost his Edinburgh Central seat to the Greens’ Lorna Slater.

“Politics is increasingly divisive, fragmented and angry,” read the message from one senior Unionist politician, “So let all parties come together and rejoice Angus Robertson’s absolute trouncing today.”

Moments later, an SNP colleague of Robertson’s responds to my request for any reaction to this shock result with a string of laughing emojis.

Throughout the campaign, the former cabinet secretary for culture and external affairs had claimed the choice facing the people of Edinburgh Central was between him or a Tory. In the end, he was pushed into third place on Thursday behind both Labour and the victorious Green candidate, a moment since confirmed by the World Health Organisation as being responsible for the single biggest outbreak of schadenfreude in history.

The Scottish Green victory in Edinburgh Central was later echoed by a decisive win in Glasgow Southside, the seat previously held by former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, for the party’s Holly Bruce. Add seats picked up on the regional lists and the Scottish Greens will have 15 MSPs in the next parliament, a record for the party since the dawn of devolution in 1999.

If the Greens had a great night, Reform UK had a better one. The party, led in Scotland by Nigel Farage-appointee Malcolm Offord, heads to Holyrood with 17 MSPs, the same number as Anas Sarwar’s Scottish Labour which is now back in existential crisis territory.

Sarwar is not alone in having had a bruising election. Before polls opened, the Scottish Conservatives were the second largest party in parliament. Now, with just 12 MSPs, they’re fourth.

The Liberal Democrats will be pleased with 10 seats, including some surprising constituency wins though whether leader Alex Cole-Hamilton, a man of so little substance we might consider him the rumour of a politician, will be able to make himself heard in what stands to be a chaotic Scottish Parliament remains uncertain.

And make no mistake, there will be chaos ahead.

First Minister John Swinney failed to lead the SNP to a majority victory. With 58 seats – still, we must remember, a remarkable result for a party that’s been in power for 19 years – it is seven short of the 65 needed to govern, comfortably, alone.

He could, in theory, march on, sans safety net, and hope to create new majorities each time a key vote looms but that would be reckless in the extreme.

Yes, Alex Salmond lead a minority SNP Government between 2007-11, but he did do having shaken hands with then Tory leader Annabel Goldie, who agreed to support his party when necessary in return for a number of concessions (most notably, if memory serves, the deployment of extra police officers on to Scotland’s streets, a move for which the SNP claimed and received credit).

Obviously, Swinney is not going to be looking for any kind of deal with current Tory leader Russell Findlay. The same applies to Anas Sarwar, Malcolm Offord and (although I can imagine him being amenable to some kind of performative “unity”) Alex Cole-Hamilton.

Of course, when the First Minister needs help, he is going to turn to the Scottish Greens, co-led by Ross Greer and Gillian Mackay.

Greer’s admiration for Swinney is hardly a secret (good relationship advice would be to find someone who talks about you the way the Greens’ co-leader talks about the SNP boss) and the parties’ shared support for independence makes some kind of arrangement feel inevitable.

Swinney’s planned first vote is on the question of independence. It’ll be meaningless theatre, of course – the FM plans to seek the approval of parliament to ask the UK Government for permission, which it will not grant, to run a second independence referendum – but it will serve as a statement of intent. The constitutional battle is going to get to get hotter.

Most important to Swinney is support for the budgets his government must pass each year and the numbers dictate that he will have no choice but to offer concessions to the Greens.

This will not be easy, largely because the priorities of Mr Greer and Ms Mackay’s party are, to say the least, divisive.

Despite a Supreme Court ruling making clear that, when it comes to the law, sex is a matter of biology, the Greens – with two trans-identifying males among its new parliamentary group – wish to resurrect legislation to allow anyone to self-identify into the legally-recognised sex of their choice. Despite foreign affairs being reserved to Westminster, the Greens wish Holyrood to vote on sanctions against Israel. Despite John Swinney’s professed desire to make Scots better off, the Greens wish to impose a punitive “wealth tax” on high achievers.

On which of these areas, I wonder, might Swinney give ground?

Many of the new Scottish Greens are of a social media generation of politicians and I don’t imagine they’ll be happy with some low-key agreements on emissions in return for their votes. They’ll want big Instagrammable deals on the matters over which they obsess.

With 15 MSPs, the Greens may be the fourth largest party at Holyrood but, given their value to the First Minister, they’re the second most powerful.

As they use that power to drag John Swinney into new battles over women’s rights and Israel’s right to exist, Angus Robertson may reflect that there are worse fates in life than losing while standing beside a man dressed as a baby gannet.