HAS Stephen Flynn bitten off more than he can chew?
He's certainly set tongues wagging both in Westminster and at Holyrood with the announcement of his intention to stand at the 2026 Scottish Parliament elections.
Stuck in the middle is the incumbent MSP for Aberdeen South, Audrey Nicoll.
She’s the chair of Holyrood’s Justice Committee and for her efforts in that job, she’s up for a gong at The Herald’s Scottish Politician of the Year ceremony later this month.
While not a towering figure in Scottish politics, Nicoll’s dutiful work in Holyrood has earnt her the respect of the people who pay attention – and Flynn’s mission to oust her will ruffle feathers.
The problem is, her seat is roughly coterminous with Flynn’s Westminster patch. As far as he's concerned, Nicoll has got to go. Eggs and omelettes come to mind.
The SNP’s majority there has been dwindling since 2011, from a healthy 22% then to a mere 4%, or just over 1500 votes, at the last election.
Perhaps Flynn is hoping he can inject some star quality into the next race and get those numbers to a healthier place for the SNP.
READ MORE: SNP politicians call for Stephen Flynn to 'rethink' bid to be both MP and MSP
If that sounds a touch cocky, I don’t think he’d deny that. Flynn wants to get ahead in politics and that requires a bit of ego. He’s good at self-promotion and seems to enjoy it, too.
Another thing that he would likely concede is that merely getting to Holyrood is not the limit of his ambition.
He’s seen as a potential future party leader, even first minister, and makes no effort to disabuse people of those impressions.
Two things are not worth stressing over. First are the finer points of the SNP’s constitution. The widely accepted story is that their “double-jobbing” rules were changed in 2020 so the high heid yins could prevent Joanna Cherry from getting a Holyrood seat.
I make no assertions about the truth of that story other than to say my gut tells me that if Flynn wants a seat in Holyrood, a path will be cleared for him to do so.
READ MORE: Will SNP rules allow Stephen Flynn to be an MP and MSP at the same time?
The second thing not to worry about too much is Flynn’s unabashed hypocrisy in his greed for parliamentary seats.
He blasted Douglas Ross for having a million jobs. As recently as last year, he actually went as far as to write a letter to Rishi Sunak saying that “being elected as an MP is a privilege and must never be treated as anything less than a full-time job”.
Keir Starmer has shown that saying one thing on Monday and doing the exact opposite on Wednesday is no barrier to becoming Prime Minister by Friday. Politics is a cynical business and Flynn can play the game.
Lastly, I will say that there are a few things about our new Labour era that make one feel stuck in a time loop.
There are debates about whether the NHS should use foreign language translators, the national obsession with weight loss seems to have been revived, Jeremy Clarkson is on TV again a lot, we’ve even got SNP leader John Swinney again. It all feels so terribly 2004.
That year, an SNP MP called Alex Salmond wanted to replace Swinney and gain a seat at the next Scottish Parliament elections. Flynn could pick a worse political role model.
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