On London’s South Bank on Tuesday night, Scottish Labour MPs met for a fundraiser for the party’s Holyrood campaign.
With attendees vying for lots — including half a sheep provided by Labour’s candidate in the Western Isles — Pat McFadden tried to make light of the events of the past week.
“It’s a Labour fundraiser: there’s food, there’s a raffle, there’s a fight,” joked the work and pensions secretary.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves was also in attendance, and the message from the Labour leadership was to back Anas Sarwar, who, less than 48 hours earlier, had called for his “close friend” Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to resign.
The Scottish Labour leader had spent the last week gaming out what would become the biggest gamble of his political career.
The former NHS dentist calculated that the scandal of Lord Peter Mandelson’s links to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein — and the prime minister’s appointment of the Labour grandee as UK ambassador to the US — would derail his already faltering campaign to prevent the Scottish National Party from winning a fifth consecutive term in office in May.
“Mandelson was the final straw,” said one adviser. “We are getting killed on the doorstep.”
After a weekend of reflection, Sarwar on Monday called a hastily convened press conference in Glasgow, where he said too many mistakes required new leadership in 10 Downing Street.
Sarwar and his team had spoken to MPs and MSPs, including potential leadership challenger Wes Streeting, in the days before his shock intervention, but cabinet ministers, including the health secretary, quickly pledged their allegiance to the prime minister. Neither the first minister of Wales nor England’s Labour mayors followed Sarwar, leaving him isolated.
Speaking on Wednesday, Sarwar said his call for Starmer to resign was his decision “alone” and not part of any “wider organisation”.
Despite the split from UK Labour, Sarwar said he would nonetheless campaign alongside Starmer and other ministers on the campaign trail if they came to show they were “delivering for Scotland”.
Many in Labour are aghast that Sarwar’s tight alignment with the UK Labour Party has been abandoned in chaotic circumstances, less than three months from the Scottish parliamentary elections.
His speech triggered frantic messaging among Labour MPs, scrambling to understand his strategy. There were tears as some accused him of treachery. “Everyone wanted to know what was going on,” said the adviser.
Portraying himself as a patriotic Scot prioritising the national interest, Sarwar hopes that distancing Scottish and UK Labour will arrest the slide in the polls.
“The war of attrition with the SNP has been lost,” said the adviser. “By putting Scotland ahead of Labour, Anas can now cast himself as an insurgent, mounting a guerrilla campaign against the incumbent.”
If Starmer is ousted after the Gorton and Denton by-election later this month, Sarwar would find vindication in having said out loud what many are thinking. But if the prime minister limps on, Sarwar will be forced to face the electorate in May with a hopelessly divided party.
“Anas has nothing to lose, so it’s worth a try — he feels that his chance of becoming first minister has been taken away by the London leadership,” said one Sarwar ally. “There is irritation north of the border that Scotland and Wales seem to be expendable — the only focus down there is on [the general election in] 2029.”
The SNP, which is polling below its last Scottish parliamentary result at around 35 per cent, nonetheless holds a commanding lead over its competitors.
After Labour’s general election victory in 2024, Sarwar had looked on track to boot SNP first minister John Swinney out of Bute House, the first minister’s official home. Now, at under 17 per cent, Scottish Labour has slipped into third place behind Reform UK on almost 19 per cent — and the Mandelson scandal has yet to be fully digested. Swinney’s steady hand has shored up pro-independence support while the rise of Reform has fractured the unionist vote.
In a battle of two incumbents, Labour’s messy two years at Westminster constantly overshadow the tired-looking SNP’s 19 years in Holyrood. “Scottish Labour are bearing the brunt of the perceived sins of their colleagues down south,” said pollster Mark Diffley.
SNP officials are marvelling at Sarwar’s decision to trigger a Labour civil war, saying their governing party can now just get on with a series of delivery-oriented announcements around healthcare and child poverty.
“Red-on-red action won’t end well,” said one. “Already, folk are complaining about politicians knifing each other in the back, especially when Anas has been best mates with Starmer for years.”
Sarwar’s allies will cling to any recovery in the polls over the next two months, seeking to tame Reform and limit the SNP’s dominance in the next parliament.
But Sarwar’s moonshot may well prove to have been little more than a forlorn hope. “It is going to take a hugely significant change in the public mood to rescue the Holyrood election for Labour,” said Diffley.
Back in London, one Scottish Labour MP said of Sarwar’s gambit: “There’s a mix of feelings. Some people are flummoxed by what he did, but others understand the position he finds himself in. It was a cry for help.”
They insisted that the party could still win the elections, but admitted: “Anas tried to stop the Westminster psychodrama infecting our campaign in Scotland — instead he has just brought it right into the heart of the election.”