This article appears as part of the Unspun: Scottish Politics newsletter.
Anas Sarwar is watching the wreckage of the Scottish Labour Party from a short distance.
Dressed in the same t-shirt and blazer combo he jokes he lent to Prime Minister Andy Burnham, Sarwar looked every inch a man without a single care in the world as he appeared at the Fringe on Sunday.
It’s an easy pose to strike when you have swapped a doomed Scottish Labour leadership for a cushty seat in the House of Lords.
But back in Glasgow, the party he left behind has been eating itself alive.
The Scottish Labour Party we see now is not one of unity. It’s hard to see how it ever can be.
Former leaders typically stay out of the contest to find a successor, but Sarwar’s attitude suggests he doesn’t care at all.
Sarwar has said Labour across the UK was facing an “existential crisis”. His response was to answer a call from the new Prime Minister urging him to become a minister for trade.
To be clear, he was right to go. The question is whether he was right to leave in the way he did. He should have stayed in Holyrood and kept the ship steady until a successor had been chosen.
We also learned this week that Scottish Labour’s membership numbers plummeted by 33% to around 11,000, during Sarwar’s years in charge.
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Malcolm Offord’s Reform UK, on the other hand, has approximately 12,500, making his party stand clearly above Scottish Labour as the second largest party, despite both having 17 MSPs in the Scottish Parliament.
It’s easy, when times are tough, to look for someone else to blame, without ever looking inward at where you could, and should, be better.
History won’t look back on Sarwar’s time as Scottish Labour leader kindly as he took the party to its worst Holyrood election result in the history of devolution.
He had his wins over the SNP, particularly in holding the Scottish Government to account on the failings at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (QEUH).
Of course, there is blame at the feet of Keir Starmer. The decisions he took, and the subsequent U-turns, on Peter Mandelson, winter fuel payments and digital ID to name a few, were always going to make the Holyrood election tougher.
Sarwar often reaps praise for being the first senior figure to call for Starmer to resign. But he was too late.
Many warned Sarwar in the first six months of Starmer’s government that the decisions were putting his Holyrood ambitions at risk. And he didn’t listen. He didn’t want to listen.
Sarwar stood by Starmer at every turn, up until around four months before the election. He stepped in to save Starmer’s blushes time and time again in front of the Scottish media and leapt to his defence over unpopular policy decisions.
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It was only when the role of first minister really began to slip away that he tried to save it. So, when Sarwar warns the challenges Scottish Labour faces are “existential”, he should accept that it happened on his watch.
At the Scottish Labour leadership hustings, the warnings for the future of the party couldn’t have been starker. Candidates warned the party was in a “coma” and now fighting for its survival.
The candidates put on a united front for the crowd, pretending to be blissfully unaware that their own teams are briefing against each other behind the scenes.
The next leader will have to answer for the party they inherit. But Sarwar built the conditions for this coma before he handed the party over.
He spent five years shielding Starmer, five years steering Scottish Labour toward its demise, and when the reckoning finally came, he didn’t stay to face it. He left for London and adopted a blasé attitude that told his colleagues in Holyrood to clean up the mess.
The party is fighting for survival. Its former leader is fighting for nothing at all.
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