Sir Keir Starmer has suggested he effectively sacked Richard Leonard as Scottish Labour leader and said the party would be “at base camp” in the polls if he had not intervened.
Leonard resigned just four months before the 2021 Holyrood election following a meeting at which Starmer told him that he did not have confidence in his leadership.
At the same time donors had refused to give any more money while Leonard was in charge and key trade unions, including the GMB, were losing faith in that regime.
In an interview with The Times, Starmer said that central to pushing Labour forward across the UK was taking “some pretty ruthless decisions . . . The Scottish leader was gone two years ago”.
He also highlighted