Humza Yousaf was the future once. Now he is the SNP’s night watchman

In his first – and possibly last – conference speech as SNP leader, the first minister announced the launch of Scotland’s ‘first-ever bond’. The absence of a one-liner about Sean Connery shows quite how dark things are within the party, says Tom Peck

First minister Humza Yousaf announced a freeze in council tax for Scots next year as he closed the SNP conference in Aberdeen (PA)

More dedicated students of history are free to write in, but to the very best of my knowledge, Humza Yousaf is the first person ever to lead his country as the result of a practical joke.

How else would you describe it? Nicola Sturgeon resigned, knowing that her own front garden would shortly be turned into a scene from Taggart, but not before she had gone about the necessary machinations to smooth the path to power for her chosen successor, Mr Yousaf. Everything that she was resigning to avoid, she knew would instead be coming for him.

All of the questions she’d decided she didn’t really want to answer, about the hundreds of thousands of campaign donations whose whereabouts were not entirely known, while the whereabouts of a luxury camper van that may or may not have been purchased with the money absolutely were known, as it was very clearly parked right outside her mother-in-law’s house? Those questions she decided would be better put to her friend, Humza Yousaf instead, who didn’t actually know anything about them, but he would soon enough.

It is hard, arguably impossible, to raise oneself up to anything approaching statesmanship in circumstances that are so brazenly hilarious; it’s hard to even see the cold-blooded cruelty lurking beneath them.

But, at the SNP’s conference in Aberdeen, giving his first and quite possibly last speech as party leader, Humza Yousaf did his absolute best, and to the man’s credit, he did not entirely fail.

For quite a long time, Yousaf was the SNP’s one to watch, its bright young thing. But it is hard not to conclude that his star has perhaps now risen a bit higher in the cosmos than its own internal gravity can handle. Many years ago, I knew someone who drove a Vauxhall Nova whose front and back end had almost certainly once belonged to different vehicles. We called it the ‘supernova’, and when I say that Yousaf is a supernova waiting to happen, it is with this image in mind, as opposed to any kind of great moment of intergalactic wonder.

That Yousaf gave the speech while his wife’s parents were trapped in Gaza and unable to access any kind of safe passage home paid testament to his personal courage. He spoke as movingly as he could manage about his kinship with Scotland’s Jewish communities and its Palestinian communities. There is scarcely a leader anywhere in the Western world who hasn’t delivered a variation on this theme at some point this week, as they have been doing for several decades. It could hardly be clearer to see how little anyone has achieved in all that time in advancing the cause of peace.

Yousaf had brought with him a series of relatively major policy announcements, which – it being the first time he had ever done anything quite like this before – he could not prevent himself from announcing with the thrillingly naff air of a Nineties game show host, whipping up the studio audience as he read out the list of prizes to be won.

“I can confirm”, he said. He paused. “I can confirm your council tax will be frozen!” Off camera, one audience member let out the kind of scream that is traditionally reserved for a last-minute winner at Hampden Park.

Yousaf was also here to announce that the Scottish government would be issuing its “first-ever bond”. This has been flirted with for a while, on the basis that it’s not altogether simple for a government that is only partially devolved, with regard to financial matters, to issue its own bonds through which to raise capital through creating its own debt.

These speeches are written by teams of people, and it seems impossible that nobody even considered, on the subject of Scotland’s first-ever bond, making any kind of Sean Connery-based gag.

Connery was indeed himself an enthusiastic backer of independence, but was also never quite able, toward the end of his life, to liberate himself from the consequences of some extremely poor-quality comments on domestic violence. One can only imagine the sadness when it was concluded that they just couldn’t go there. Not least as, at the last count, he has at least two million Dr No’s.

Yousaf and the SNP intend to spend the next year trying to connive a way to turn the general election into a mandate for a second independence referendum. Already, the talk is that winning a simple majority of Scotland’s 56 Westminster seats can be interpreted in such a way, even though they know they are set for a radical decline from their current number, and support for their burning cause is burning ever dimmer by the day.

William Hague still likes to say of his stint as Tory party leader, between 1997 and 2001, that “someone had to do the night shift”. Yousaf is certainly the SNP’s night watchman. The sun has set, but the more pertinent question is whether it is going to come back up again at all.