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ARE Labour trying to throw the Holyrood election next year?
That’s the question we’ve been asking ourselves here at National Towers today.
It might seem a strange thing to ask. But it's surely the only explanation for the UK Government announcing on Tuesday that Scots would be “seeing a lot more” of the Prime Minister and other ministers ahead of the Scottish Parliament election.
Darren Jones, chief secretary to the PM, told The Scotsman: “Yeah, you'll definitely be seeing him [Keir Starmer]. You’ll probably see him on multiple occasions, I would expect, between now and May.”
Time was that a new prime minister would lend some of their star power to devolved elections to boost their party’s chances.
No such luck for the catastrophically unpopular Starmer.
He will travel across the Tweed as one of the few people less popular than Donald Trump.
That’s according to a bombshell poll by Ipsos from September, which found that the Prime Minister’s approval rating in Scotland had dropped to the lowest level the polling firm had ever recorded for him.
It was the same story for Anas Sarwar, who has a net approval rating in Scotland of minus 26. For Starmer, it was minus 47.
Trump fared only slightly better with a net approval rating of minus 46. A whopping 63% of people had a negative view of the Prime Minister’s performance after just over a year in office.
Can you blame them? From his nauseating displays of loyalty to Trump, to sticking with draconian Tory welfare policies, standing idly by while Grangemouth closed only to pull out all the stops for an English steel works, Starmer has hardly endeared himself to Scots.
Whether we will see all that much of Starmer when he is in Scotland is a separate question.
Labour bigwigs’ trips north of the Border are usually shrouded in secrecy, with only the media elect allowed to question them.
As we’ve highlighted before, you’ve a better chance of seeing Halley’s Comet than you do of catching a glimpse of a Labour minister on one of their strictly stage-managed trips to Scotland.
Starmer’s last jaunt to Scotland saw him dodging the press – with the exception of just one newspaper – when he visited a shipyard in Glasgow.
Rachel Reeves has also avoided the Scottish press when she visited back in August and in May. Lisa Nandy has performed similar feats of invisibility while north of the Border.
But the greatest farce was when Angela Rayner tried to duck scrutiny while in Scotland. She’d successfully avoided the media on a visit to Govan in January and tried to do the same in May.
Unfortunately for her, we thought it’d be fun to undermine her attempted media blackout and showed up at the Hamilton by-election campaign office uninvited.
We were not alone: Our intrepid reporter Xander Elliards arrived to find the place teeming with pro-Palestine activists demonstrating against the UK Government’s complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Rayner scarpered and eventually submitted to questioning in the garden of a house in a village near Hamilton. Her finest hour it was not. Needless to say, her political career went from strength to strength from then on.
We only hope the Prime Minister covers himself in as much glory when he makes his next journey to Scotland.
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