STEPHEN DAISLEY: Swinney interfering within the US is not only a private humiliation… he is managed to embarrass Scotland
When John Swinney urged Americans to vote for Kamala Harris in November’s US presidential election, I wondered if he was setting himself up for a heaping slice of humble pie.
Turns out I was wrong. It wasn’t pie, it was humble teacake. According to news reports, that’s what was served at the first minister’s Bute House meeting with Eric Trump: Tunnock’s teacakes, caramel wafers and chocolate chip shortbread.
The Scottish Government insisted the meeting was strictly about business. The president’s son is executive vice president of the Trump Organisation and ultimately responsible for the company’s golf courses in Balmedie and Turnberry.
Swinney was simply engaging with a significant employer in Scotland.
Most business leaders the first minister meets haven’t previously branded him ‘nasty’ for denouncing their father to the media.
That’s point one. For point two, we turn to the statement from Scottish Green co-leader Lorna Slater: ‘When it comes to the Trumps, the line between business and politics has always been blurred.’
Much as I hate to write this sentence, Lorna Slater is right. Eric Trump is not just some businessman who happens to be related to the US president.
He’s a senior executive in his father’s company, was a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention last July, and appeared on Fox News the night after the election to talk about dad’s victory.
Eric Trump enjoyed a cuppa with First Minister Humza Yousaf at Bute House last week before checking progress on the Trump Organization’s new golf course in Aberdeenshire
By all means sit down with the man, but don’t try to pretend there is no political significance to the confab.
It’s not the first conciliatory noise to issue from Bute House since Trump Snr’s re-election.
Swinney pivoted from Harris supporter to Trump sycophant with such alacrity that he tweeted his congratulations 13 minutes before the Associated Press called the election.
Then he fired off a letter that did more crawling than a centipede, telling the returning president that he had ‘worked hard to shape the United States into a global power’.
He told First Minister’s Questions that he would engage with the White House to advance Scotland’s interests ‘notwithstanding people’s views about the President’.
The bloke did everything but pull on a red cap and chant ‘build the wall’. What a difference 77 million votes and a $7 trillion budget make.
Reacting to Swinney’s meeting with Trump fils, Russell Findlay called the first minister ‘a shameless hypocrite and opportunist’.
Donald Trump may have won the presidency twice, against all the odds, but his son is the real political miracle-worker: he got Lorna Slater and Russell Findlay to agree on something.
John Swinney’s meddling in US politics has done Scotland no favours
The Scottish Conservative leader rebukes Swinney as an opportunist, but there is no crime in opportunism.
When you are the head of government in a small country, with the world’s most powerful man slapping on tariffs left and right, a dash of cynicism and a great dollop of pragmatism are very much in order.
Jobs, investment and economic growth are at stake.
It would be easy to thumb your nose at Trump and decry his many faults, but it would also be reckless and indulgent.
The pounds in people’s pockets should come before piety and pontificating.
I’m not all that keen on the man myself, and I’m in good company on that. Polling from earlier this month showed that 71 per cent of Scottish adults have an unfavourable view of Trump.
But he is the president of the United States, with an ego the size of the Empire State Building, a hair-trigger temper, and a hankering to annex countries and territories that take his fancy.
Any first minister who resolved to antagonise a man like that would be derelict in his duty to the country.
I would give Swinney credit for cooperating with Trump and his business interests if he had been that shrewd from the start.
If he had studied the 2016 race, and Trump’s unpredicted triumph over the Democrats and the mainstream media, and ca’ed canny on the 2024 content lest the applecart be upset a second time.
Instead, Swinney stepped into the purity trap.
He bought into the myth that a political leader is an agent of virtue, obliged to take a stand on every issue of the day.
The first minister is neither a clergyman nor a moral philosopher. We do not look to him for ethical guidance. We pay him to run the country.
I hate to burst their bubbles but politicians are not a special breed.
They might be elitist in their contempt for the ordinary punter but few are elite in ability or historical significance.
Think of government ministers as car mechanics, only instead of checking your oil and replacing your spark plugs, the engine they are asked to maintain is Scotland.
Tighten the loose screws in the NHS, crank up standards in education, and keep the economy running smoothly.
Do you care which US politician your car mechanic prefers? Would it ever occur to you to ask?
Are you likely to take your custom elsewhere if you discover that his political views differ from yours?
Of course not. You want him to fix your motor, not save the world.
Swinney wouldn’t have been left looking like a two-faced poltroon if he simply refrained from involving himself in foreign affairs. (We really should have a law that outlines which powers are devolved to Holyrood and which are reserved to Westminster. We could call it the Scotland Act.)
This is about more than yet another first minister who refuses to stay in his constitutional lane.
Barely a week goes by without some new cause or craze taking hold at Holyrood, that palace of pomposity.
The lapel pins change, the lanyards are swapped out, but the air of smug moral certainty remains.
Some would call this virtue-signalling but what they’re actually signalling is their own importance.
If Westminster politicians get to express an opinion on something, then so should their Holyrood counterparts, because they’re just as good and it’s an insult to devolution to suggest otherwise.
First things first: MSPs are not equal to MPs. MPs sit in a sovereign parliament. MSPs sit in a body that owes its very existence to that parliament and its willingness to delegate its powers.
Secondly, if it is insulting to remind MSPs that their job revolves around Scottish schools, hospitals and crime, and not grandstanding about MAGA or Gaza, how contemptuous must they feel towards the duties they were elected to carry out?
The purity trap is not only insufferably arrogant and self-aggrandising, it is a distraction for a parliament that has more than enough troubles within its remit to focus on.
Did the attainment gap close without us noticing? Are 18-month waits on the NHS suddenly a thing of the past?
Did the public finance crisis in local government solve itself over the weekend? If not, most voters would rather Holyrood turn its attention to those matters than swell the ranks of the ‘resistance’ against Donald Trump.
John Swinney puffed himself up and poked his nose into US politics, only to have the wind knocked out of him by American voters.
Deflated, and perhaps even chastened, he is now forced to ingratiate himself with the man whose defeat he urged.
hat is humiliating for him but, more importantly, it is embarrassing for Scotland.
In the spirit of Donald Trump, let’s offer the first minister a deal: we’ll be interested in what he thinks about the problems of other nations once he’s finishing fixing the problems of this one.
