STEPHEN DAISLEY: Anas Sarwar gets his second act... having turned off Scottish Labour's life support

By STEPHEN DAISLEY, SCOTTISH DAILY MAIL SKETCH WRITER Published: 19:46, 22 July 2026 | Updated: 19:47, 22 July 2026 It was F Scott Fitzgerald who said there were no second acts in American lives. American lives could do with a House of Lords, source of many a second act in the lives of British politicians. The first act in Anas Sarwar’s political life was a tale of promise unfulfilled.  As the scion of the Sarwar family, he was fated to go far.  His father, Chaudhry Mohammad Sarwar, became Britain’s first Muslim MP in 1997 when he won Glasgow Govan for Labour. Come his retirement in 2010, his son inherited the seat, now styled Glasgow Central, and won it handsomely at that year’s general election.  Elevation to Scottish Labour’s deputy leadership came a year later. Sarwar was on course for great things. The SNP won a majority in the following year’s Holyrood election, David Cameron rewarded them with an independence referendum, and the sight of Labour politicians locking arms with Tories to fight for the Union proved the breaking point for many in the party’s post-industrial heartlands.  The yellow tsunami of 2015 swept Sarwar from parliament and with him every other Labour MP not called Ian Murray. Andy Burnham looks set to hand Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar a role in his government If Sarwar was to have a political career, he would need to take another tack. And he wanted a political career; his profession of dentistry was not for him. Childhood proximity to politics seldom inspires indifference. The offspring of parliamentarians either come to despise the job and its gruelling demands on family life, and seek for themselves a career far from the political spotlight, or they become hooked and find they cannot resist the power and the platform, the ideals and the intrigue. There is rarely a middle ground. Sarwar resolved to take the former path but ended up on the latter. Growing up a Sarwar came with a lot of public baggage: a father not unknown for controversy, the bitter infighting that was then as now a hallmark of Labour in Scotland, and the background noise of being a Muslim public figure in the wake of 9/11, 7/7 and the growing tensions around Islamism, immigration and multiculturalism. Recalling these years in a 2024 interview, Sarwar described them as a ‘horrific time’ that ‘felt like a hostile environment for young Muslims across the country’. It was enough to drive anyone into a life of fillings and root canals and plaque scalings. What, then, took him into politics? In a word, Perveen. His mother. Perveen, it is generally acknowledged, is the power behind the throne. She was and remains at least as well-connected and ideologically active as her husband, and he went on to serve two terms as governor of Punjab. A sift through Pakistani press cuttings makes clear both the affection in which Perveen was held by her husband’s supporters and the respect she commanded from veteran political operators.  The Sarwar dynasty is a matriarchal one. As he told an interviewer a few years ago: ‘All the things we’ve been through as a family, whether it be the difficulties of first standing as a candidate, the death threats, the security we had to have around the house – throughout all that, the rock in the family has been my mother. My father would not have got through all these crises, anywhere near it, without my mother.’ That meant a political formation unimaginable to most, with an 11-year-old Anas taken by his mother to meet Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. However, it was not in the glamour or personal ambition of politics that he was trained but in public service and a piety for justice.  No one surveying his ten years at Holyrood could doubt his commitment to justice. If he is associated with any cause it is that of Milly Main, a ten-year-old who died while a patient of the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital. Milly, one of three children whose deaths have been linked to hospital-acquired infection, had undergone successful treatment for leukaemia when a line inserted into her veins became infected with the bacteria stenotrophomonas maltophilia. She died in 2017. Her mother, Kimberly Darroch, launched a quest for the truth about her daughter’s death, one in which she soon found Sarwar at her back. Across years of parliamentary questions, ministerial meetings, and freedom of information requests, Sarwar chipped away at a wall of secrecy erected around the health board and dogged the Scottish Government with awkward questions about what it knew and when. Sarwar will no doubt be eager to make the most of the opportunity provided by Burnham That these deaths are under investigation for possible criminal proceedings is in part because of Sarwar’s determination, one which did not lessen when he took over as Scottish Labour leader in 2021. Press beyond this, however, and his record at the top of the Holyrood Labour group is nothing to boast about.  He led its party to its worst-ever result in a Scottish parliament election and proved incapable of parlaying the SNP’s many scandals and schisms into a Labour resurgence. When he was elected leader, Sarwar was considered Labour’s best chance of wresting back control of the devolved government from the Nationalists. Whatever chance he had, he blew it, and the SNP is approaching 20 years in power and will remain there until at least 2031. Sarwar failed badly. He suffered, it is true, from William Hague Syndrome.  Just as the former Conservative leader routinely bested Tony Blair at Prime Minister’s Questions, only for Blair to trounce him on election day, Sarwar made light work of Nicola Sturgeon, then Humza Yousaf, then John Swinney at Holyrood but couldn’t best them where it mattered. If elections were decided at the dispatch box instead of the ballot box, Sarwar would be First Minister today. Democracy is a grand idea until the voters get involved. When he decided to call for Keir Starmer to go, Sarwar was trying to recover his party from a polling slump, but he was also eyeing up an escape plan. Ditch Holyrood for Westminster and his career might finally unstall. What he does with his peerage and his ministry we will have to wait and see, but he will be adamant that he make a success of this second act. For the son of immigrants to find himself draped in ermine is no small feat, but personal biography can all too easily slip into identity politics, and the politics that matters is material.  What have you done? How have you improved people’s lives? Sarwar will get another chance to answer these questions. Scottish Labour, however, will get no second act.  A party which has lost five Holyrood elections in a row, and whose leader has so little faith in it that he has jumped ship to a new and largely untested government, is a party without a future. Scottish Labour long ago lost its electoral coalition and has failed to build a new one. It is a party of yesterday, living on past glories and a dwindling constituency who vote for it out of duty, sentiment, and a fading folk memory. No one wants to admit this so Sarwar will be replaced, probably by someone as well-intentioned, and they too will fail and so will whoever comes after them.  The experiment will be repeated in the expectation of a result that will never come. Scottish Labour is a political movement that can no longer move itself or anyone else. All Anas Sarwar has done is switch off the life support.