Humza Yousaf is not a popular man. He might have won the final vote to be the new First Minister of Scotland, but only 50,000 people actually voted in the election, and of those, only 24,000 voted for him as their favourite – that’s less than one-third of the Scottish National Party’s 72,000 members. Not a great start.

And for all the relentless hyping up of Nicola Sturgeon’s long reign, the government he inherits isn’t very popular either. The latest Scottish Political Pulse survey from Ipsos shows 50 per cent of Scots think that “generally speaking things in Scotland are headed in the wrong direction.” Only 25 per cent think it is headed in the right direction, the rest don’t know. That number rises slightly for SNP voters – to 37 per cent – but even that is down from 44 per cent earlier in the year.

Bloomberg Opinion