John Swinney as leader? "We tried that, it didn't work."

The title of this post contains the exact words John Swinney himself used a few years ago when someone suggested he might be a future leader.  Because he was of course leader between 2000 and 2004, and it really didn't work.  The SNP had convinced themselves that the public would warm to Swinney as an 'elder brother' figure who was much less divisive and Marmite than his predecessor Alex Salmond, but the public had other ideas. 

I can remember multiple appearances by John Curtice on Newsnight Scotland in which he urged the SNP to face up to the fact that they had a major leadership problem.  The polls consistently showed Swinney was the least popular of the four main party leaders - which not only meant he was less popular than Henry McLeish and Jack McConnell, but also less popular than the Tory leader David McLetchie and the Lib Dem leader Jim Wallace.  That predictably was reflected in election results, with the SNP losing ground in terms of both votes and seats at the 2001 general election, before a major setback at the 2003 Holyrood election when they slipped from 35 seats to 27, followed by the ultimate humilation when they dropped below 20% of the vote at the 2004 European elections.  At that point the game was up, Swinney was replaced by his predecessor Salmond, and the general consensus was that his whole four-year leadership was a failed experiment.

Why, in an emergency situation, would you return to a failed experiment?  Unless of course your only priority is to muddle through and maintain the control of the ruling faction any way you can, rather than to work out what is in the best interests of the SNP and the wider independence movement?

Even now, even after the catastrophe of the last year, they still just don't 'get it'.