You can get The National's Real Scottish Politics newsletter free and direct to your inbox every weekday.
ANAS Sarwar’s ascent to the House of Lords is great news for young Scottish kids. It just goes to show that no matter who you are or where you’re from, if you have multi-million-pound Labour donors for parents, you too could become a Lord.
Drawing allegations of being a chancer, Sarwar has U-turned on his own pledge never to join the House of Lords, ignored his own calls for the “unacceptable” institution to be abolished, and left his own MSP group leaderless just weeks after saying he would “absolutely” not be resigning.
On these occasions and others, Sarwar misled the public. But broken promises are not the only question raised by his promotion.
This is a man who left university, worked for four years as a dentist, and then followed his millionaire father into a career in politics. So what exactly qualifies him to be a life peer and UK Government minister?
Sarwar’s first parliamentary role came when took over his father Mohammad Sarwar’s seat at Westminster in 2010. (The elder Sarwar, incidentally, was also nominated for a life peerage – but it was blocked amid questions over his tax affairs.)
Sarwar lost his Westminster seat to the SNP in 2015, but was then elected to Holyrood in 2016 thanks to being top of the Glasgow Labour list – essentially a guaranteed spot as an MSP. One year later, he lost his first bid to become Scottish Labour leader.
In 2021, thanks to his close ally Keir Starmer intervening to remove the incumbent Richard Leonard, Sarwar managed to become Scottish Labour leader on the second time of asking. Within months, he had led the party to their worst-ever Holyrood election result.
Five years later in 2026, he did it again, leading Scottish Labour to a second record-low result – this time of just 17 MSPs, equal with Reform UK.
In his 10 years at Holyrood and five years at Westminster, Sarwar managed to secure £300,000 in donations from his own millionaire family, but otherwise achieved precious little. He did not successfully lead or spearhead a change in the law anywhere in the UK.
The same cannot be said, for example, of Monica Lennon (the returning MSP whom Sarwar defeated in the 2021 Scottish Labour leadership election) who in 2022 saw legislation she had led make Scotland the first country in the world to make period products free for all.
Sarwar even watched his intervention against former prime minister Starmer backfire, failing to produce anything more than a rally of support from the UK Cabinet. If anything, Starmer looked safer after Sarwar called for his resignation.
So this all begs the question: what exactly qualifies Sarwar to become a lawmaker for life? What qualifies him to be, if reports are to be believed, a trade minister?
Could it be that Sarwar has struck some smart deals in Labour Party backrooms, and they are now paying dividends?
There were rumours flying back in February that Sarwar had made his ill-fated call for Starmer to resign after making a deal with Andy Burnham. Now Burnham is prime minister and those rumours are cropping up again. This time, they are not dismissed so quickly – and the SNP are saying the “whole thing reeks of a long-planned scheme”.
Whether it was co-ordinated or not, Sarwar’s testing-the-water call for Starmer to resign allowed Burnham to survey the state of play, sit back, and bide his time.
A promise of a reward for putting his neck out may have helped the Scottish Labour MSP make his decision, especially as his career at Holyrood was hardly going anywhere. Five years of competing with Reform UK for second-best was stretching out before him.
Putting Sarwar in the Lords could also be a win from Burnham’s perspective. The Scottish Labour leader who called for his predecessor to resign is now having his mouth stuffed with gold (a ministerial salary plus generous Lords expenses) and being tied into collective responsibility.
But the issue for Burnham is that he came to power pledging to do things differently, to represent working people, and to tackle the cost of living crisis. Appointing the election-losing scion of a millionaire donor family to the Lords and a ministerial role is hardly a great first step.
