Humza Yousaf and Rishi Sunak share a problem that's tearing both their parties apart – Alistair Carmichael

Like the Tories’ Rishi Sunak, SNP leader Humza Yousaf is not a winner and everyone knows it, writes Alistair Carmichael

An unelected leader with poor political instincts. Conflicts with an increasingly fractious radical wing. Self-inflicted crises which overwhelm every attempt to reset the agenda. You might be forgiven for asking whether we’re talking about Rishi Sunak or Humza Yousaf.

Yousaf’s latest decision to take the metaphorical gun and fire it at his own feet may have come in a spat with the Scottish Greens, but the roots of his troubles come from the same place as Sunak’s: political authority, or lack thereof.

Not for the first time, I’ve been struck by the truth that the SNP and the Tories share the same approach to politics. Both parties prize victory above all, and their leaders’ stock rises and falls on the perception that they’re winners. Neither party has any strong, unifying attachment to political ideology.

That’s why the putatively progressive SNP came within a few votes of choosing arch-conservative Kate Forbes as leader last year. For the same reason, the Tories spun shamelessly from Boris Johnson’s populism to Liz Truss’s libertarianism to Sunak’s technocracy within a few weeks in 2022.

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It is pragmatism elevated to a principle. It has made both the Conservatives and the SNP incredibly successful – but as both Sunak and Yousaf have found, this political principle relies upon your leader having political authority. The system runs on winning. The more that MPs and MSPs and members start to question your ability to carry on that run of wins, the more they look around and notice their deep political disagreements. Unity breaks down.

Rishi Sunak is not a political winner and neither is Humza Yousaf (Picture: Henry Nicholls/pool/AFP via Getty Images)

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Nicola Sturgeon was a winner, and she could enforce iron discipline on her party, from far left to hard right. She projected strength, and her party followed. Yousaf is not a winner, and everyone knows it. He is weak, so he follows his party.

He may have pipped Forbes to the post last year but in almost every key decision he has bent to her agenda. The defenestration of the Scottish Greens, whatever the merits, is just the latest example. Caught between the left and the right, and lacking the authority to bridge the gap, it feels like only a matter of time before Yousaf falls through the middle.

Alistair Carmichael is Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland