26 March 2025

“John Swinney is no Jack Sparrow”

Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster.

Photo by Emily Macinnes/Bloomberg via Getty Images

SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn preparing to jump ship for Holyrood opens the tantalising prospect of at least one Scottish by-election. The sitting Nat MSP in Aberdeen whom Flynn intended to challenge, Audrey Nicoll, put down her claymore and is stepping aside. Flynn, a forlorn SW1 figure since losing his PMQs slot after last July’s electoral massacre, was accused in the voting lobby of running away from London after wearing a backpack. He’s one of three serving SNP MPs and 18 former MPs bidding for Holyrood berths. The rush was mocked by Torcuil Crichton, Labour MP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, otherwise known as the Western Isles. “The SNP slate is going to look like the ghost crew from Pirates of the Caribbean if all those abandoning the Commons and the political dead trying to rise from Nicola Sturgeon’s locker are selected,” mused Crichton, “but the SNP is no Black Pearl and that John Swinney, he’s no Jack Sparrow.” Crichton was a Daily Record scribbler before becoming an MP. He’s not lost the tabloid vibe.

Greater love hath no mandarin than to lay down a top post for the sake of his cabinet partner’s career. Allies of Rachel Reeves, stressing the Iron Chancellor’s resilience amid an onslaught over cuts and freebies, cited her hubby, high-flyer Nicholas Joicey, exiting Whitehall for Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government as evidence she’s at the Treasury for the long run. Keir Starmer publicly backed his Chancellor, yet sceptics muttered that football club chairmen often expressed full confidence in managers before giving them the order of the boot. Self-sacrificing Joicey is also only, erm, interim chief operating officer after moving from Defra.

Routed Tory former defence secretary Grant Shapps is on comeback manoeuvres. Surviving Conservative MPs and wannabe returnees report he sends volleys of gushing notes hailing anybody and everybody, and will turn up at the opening of an envelope to network. The talk is he’s armouring up to fight a by-election should a colleague who held a seat in 2024 prefer ermine – is that you, Oliver Dowden? – and, modest man that Shapps is, eyes himself as a successor to Kemi Badenoch. Rishi Sunak’s resignation honours list has still to see the light of day nearly nine months after the election. Lord-in-waiting Gove must fret he’ll be forever Mr G.

Every cloud has a silver lining, and for former MP Mike Amesbury it is not voting for welfare cuts he opposes. Labour faces an explosive by-election in Runcorn where ex-Imperial Chemical Industries workers with occupational pensions are revolting over the winter fuel axe. Amesbury told friends he fears Starmer’s will be a one-term government. The brawler could always write a book on his part in the PM’s downfall.