John Swinney knew it would be bad for the SNP – but not this bad, says Euan McColm

John Swinney had replaced Humza Yousaf – who quit in advance of a confidence vote – just two weeks before Rishi Sunak announced his decision to go to the country and neither he nor his party were ready for the organisational and financial pressures of a major campaign. Add to that an ongoing police investigation into SNP finances and growing splits in party ranks over independence strategy and it’s difficult to imagine less propitious circumstances under which Swinney could have put his nascent leadership to the test.

So, yes, he knew it was going to be difficult. But Swinney had no idea last Thursday was going to be quite so catastrophic for the SNP.

In advance of polling day, much talk was about whether – as a number of surveys had suggested – Labour could overtake the SNP. Given the fact the nationalists sent 48 MPs to Westminster after the last election in 2019 and Labour just one, this looked unlikely to senior figures in both parties.

When the exit poll, released as ballot booths closed on Thursday night, predicted a Labour landslide, there was little surprise. But one statistic stood out as being a strange. Could it really be true that the SNP, for all its woes, was on course to win just 10 seats?

Messages exchanged with key players in both Labour and the SNP confirmed I was not alone in thinking this prediction so proposterous that it cast doubt on whatever process pollsters were using.

Turned out the process – asking people how they’d voted and then totting up the results – was accurate.

By the time Sir Keir Starmer had been confirmed, early on Friday, as the UK’s next Prime Minister with 411 seats and a thwocking great majority of 172, the SNP had managed to retain just nine of its seats while Sottish Labour was up from one in 2019 to 37.

On Friday, Swinney addressed the scale of his party’s defeat. There were two matters which required his urgent attention.

The first thing for Swinney and the SNP to look at was the bond of trust with voters. The second area in which his party had to “engage and to learn” was on the question of independence.

On Friday, the First Minister – quite wrongly – claimed that, in the 2021 Holyrood election, the people of Scotland gave a “mandate” to the Scottish Parliament to hold a second independence referendum. Matters constitutional are reserved to Westminster. Neither the Scottish Parliament nor the Scottish Government can be mandated to carry out something over which they have no power.

Upon this foundation of bullshit, Swinney built an explanation for his party’s newest position on independence. The mandate of 2021 (that’s the mandate that does not – and could never – exist) had been thwarted and so, last week, the SNP had asked voters to “intensify pressure” for it to be enacted.

“I have to accept,” said Swinney, “that we failed to convince people of the urgency of independence in this election campaign and, therefore, we need to take the time to consider and reflect on how we deliver our commitment to independence, which remains absolute.”

As is perfectly typical of a statement related to the e constitution by a senior SNP figure, Swinney’s attempted to keep those on both sides of the constitutional debate happy. As is equally typical, it will do neither.

The First Minister wanted nationalists to hear his firm commitment to their cause while he wanted Unionist Scots (still, according to most polls, the majority) to hear of the need for time for his party to reflect. To one half of Scots, then, the message was “carry on, lads!” while to the other, which would very much appreciate an end to seemingly interminable and utterly exhausting fighting with the UK Government over independence, it was “I’m listening. I hear you”.

The point at which any SNP leader might have had any reasonable hope of being able to keep happy both nationalist and unionist voters vanished on the morning after the 2014 referendum campaign. By that point, tribes had been chosen.

The question of trust in the in the SNP and support for independence are inextricably linked. How any pro independence party can build majority support for its central policy if it doesn’t enjoy the trust of the people eludes me.

Yet it is the SNP – and not its frequently useless opponents – that does most to undermine faith in its politics.

Successive nationalist First Ministers have come to power promising to lead for all, regardless of their position on the constitution. This was a promise made, too, by Labour’s three incumbents in the role.

But no Labour First Minister could ever have been bold enough in using the powers of Holyrood to satisfy nationalist Scots and no SNP holder of that role can ever be willing enough to use, positively, the existing powers of devolution or to explore the possibility of working with the UK Government to satisfy Unionists.

The First Minister, freed – post-election – from the immediate need to gee-up what remains of the SNP-faithful, should take this moment to be honest with them: there will be no referendum without the full agreement of the UK government. Swinney should return to – and make formal – the position once briefed by those close to former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon that there would not – nor should there be – any attempt to secure a second referendum until polls continue to show, over a period of several months, support for independence running at more than 60 per cent.

Many impatient Scottish nationalists want the SNP to be “bolder” on independence but John Swinney just put the issue front and centre of the SNP’s election campaign and look what happened.