Euan McColm: Political executioners lurk as Keir Starmer and John Swinney look like condemned men

The hanging began several weeks ago when Labour MP Josh Simons quit his Makerfield seat to force the by-election won by Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham on Thursday. The drawing is taking place over this weekend as Sir Keir Starmer, holed up with his wife Victoria, calculates his chances of fending off an imminent leadership challenge.

The brutal quartering will unfold in the hours and days to come when Burnham make his move.

The idea that Andy Burnham – a man who previously lost leadership contests to both Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn – is the answer to the problems facing the Labour Party and the country would have seemed a novel one just a few years ago and so we wait to be proved wrong.

Starmer is the architect of his own downfall. Having benefited from voter anger over years of chaos under the Conservatives, he strode into Downing Street two years ago with a landslide majority and a cast-iron mandate for change – and then began changing the wrong things.

Starmer’s early decision to withdraw the winter fuel allowance for pensioners swiftly became emblematic of his government.

The PM’s flaws as a politician were exposed by that decision (later partially reversed) which he should have been able to sell to the electorate with a story about the need to invest in, say, young people. Instead, because Starmer is a default-setting technocrat, he failed to include a scintilla of politics in his announcement that Granny was going to have to pay for those extra two bars herself.

A kind of mania has gripped many Labour MPs who, fearful of the threat posed by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, have decided Burnham – a popular mayor, for sure – is the statesman the United Kingdom needs in these times of national and global uncertainty.

Who knows? Perhaps they’re right and the new MP for Makerfield will unite the nation as the father of a new era of prosperity. Maybe what the UK needs right now is someone who’d make a pretty decent guidance teacher on a school trip to York Minster… “look, Darren, you’re a good lad, you just need to think a bit. We cool?”

Those in the grip of Burnham-mania point to polls showing the PM-in-waiting has the best chance of stemming to rise of Reform.

But Prime Minister Andy Burnham benefits, as he did throughout the by-election campaign, from being conceptual. Right now, Andy Burnham leads the country in the fantasies of panic-stricken Labour MPs, dreaming of a future where we all stand singing “Wonderwall”.

We’ll find out soon enough, I suppose.

Sir Keir Starmer is not the only national leader whose position has been weakened by a by-election result.

Two contests in Scotland on Thursday, caused by the decisions of sitting SNP MPs to move to Holyrood, produced starkly contrasting results. The nationalists retained Arbroath and Broughty Ferry but were humiliated by the Conservatives in Aberdeen South.

Within minutes of the announcement that Tory candidate Douglas Lumsden had taken the seat with 50 per cent of the vote, the man whose move to the Scottish Parliament triggered the contest chipped in.

Stephen Flynn – now cabinet secretary for the economy, tourism and transport – wrote on social media platform X: “A tough night in Aberdeen that some will need to reflect on, quite heavily.”

This was not even thinly-veiled stuff. After defeat, any reflection must come from the top.

The cover of the new issue of Scottish politics magazine, Holyrood, features a photo of Swinney and Flynn in kilts and Scotland tops, captioned, Private Eye-style, with speech bubbles.

“No Swinney, no party,” declares the First Minister.

“That’s what you think,” replies Flynn.

That brutal gag captures perfectly a moment of real tension in the SNP. More than two decades of party unity – sometimes viciously enforced by the acolytes of a succession of leaders – has begun to crumble.

Fittingly, given the party’s recent obsessions, the SNP is entering an identity crisis.

The fundamental of the party’s mission remains constant: There is no disagreement among elected members about the need for independence.

It’s just everything else that’s a problem.

The SNP of 2026 is unrecognisable as the party that won its first Holyrood election under Alex Salmond in 2007.

Then, the nationalists ruled from the moderate centre ground and key to the party’s economic argument was the wealth that would be enjoyed once an independent Scotland had full ownership of the oil and gas beneath the North Sea.

In 2014, as he campaigned for independence, it was the price of Brent Crude on which Salmond based his promises of endless sunlit uplands.

Under Nicola Sturgeon, an ideologically-driven rush towards net-zero saw the oil and gas industry abandoned by a party that had exploited it for 50 years.

John Swinney shares Stephen Flynn’s view about the need for the SNP to reconnect with the oil and gas industry but the First Minister is weak and unwilling to stand up to those ideologues in his cabinet who believe the loss of hundreds of jobs and the share decline of Aberdeen a price worth paying to be seen as “leading” on this issue.

That same weakness meant Swinney buckled when younger colleagues insisted the Scottish Government defend in court the “right” of trans-identifying rapists to be imprisoned alongside vulnerable women.

On Friday, the Scottish Government’s policy of allowing men who say they are women to be jailed with women was ruled illegal at the Court of Session.

The First Minister, because he is too weak to call an end to the gender madness fomented by Nicola Sturgeon, claims this matter is complex.

It is not.

John Swinney has just lost a vital by-election and wasted hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money defending rapists’ rights.

Might Stephen Flynn be the First Minister’s Andy Burnham, ready to wield the executioners blade?