The Scottish Labour Party may just have to wait for Nicola Sturgeon to fail

With Richard Leonard standing down as leader, John Rentoul asks if Labour will ever turn the tide against the SNP in Scotland

Nicola Sturgeon has now seen off her third Labour leader in the Scottish parliament (AFP/Getty Images)

Richard Leonard is only the latest in a line of Scottish Labour leaders to have been flattened by the juggernaut of identity politics. 

It is unfair and no fault of his that one of his most significant failings is that he has an English accent, a drawback in a culture in which Scottishness is now so important. 

But nor did he have other qualities sufficient to offset this lack. His formulaic Corbynism was useful, in that his leadership completed the rebuttal of the thesis that the answer to Labour’s problems in Scotland was a full-throated old-fashioned “socialist” programme.