Michael Matheson accused of 'backroom deal' in Holyrood exit
It has been claimed the former health secretary agreed to leave Holyrood after negotiating a strategy that would allow him to leave on 'his own terms'.
The conditions of that exit were that he passed internal vetting and that prominent SNP activist Toni Giugliano was blocked from taking his place.
Read more:
Pressure had been mounting on Mr Matheson to step aside after he was handed the longest ever ban in Holyrood for accumulating a data roaming bill of £11,000 on his parliamentary iPad while on holiday in Morocco.
Fallout from the 2024 general election result, where the SNP fell to nine seats, led to then candidate Mr Giugliano to blame Mr Matheson's conduct.
Earlier this month, The Herald revealed party activists in Falkirk had accused the SNP of a 'stitch up' after Mr Giugliano was suspended and remove from the candidate list in Falkirk West.
The suspension related to a bullying complaint first made against the former SNP policy chief in August 2024. Under rules from the SNP, complaints must be referred to the disciplinary committee no later than a month after the allegations are made.
However, it was not escalated and the complaint was then dropped, with Mr Giugliano passing party vetting on March 12, 2025.
But sources close to Mr Giugliano said the complaint was resurrected days after he secured a nomination by local branch members in Falkirk.
The SNP have strongly denied the allegations, further rejecting any involvement of Mr Matheson and SNP leader John Swinney.
But a senior party insider told The Herald: 'This is all Michael Matheson's doing.
'Matheson had no intention of standing down in Falkirk West. John had to persuade them and a deal was struck.
Toni Giugliano (Image: PA) "One of Matheson's conditions for stepping aside was that he would pass vetting so it didn't look like he was pushed.
"Another condition was that Toni Giugliano be barred from standing in his seat.'
The source added that the complaint made against Mr Giugliano was a "smokescreen", adding: "If he had stood in any other seat, right now he'd probably be an SNP candidate.
"To be fair to John - he couldn't have Matheson hanging around like a bad smell - he had to go. And Toni is nothing but collateral in Matheson's exit plan.
Read more:
"Matheson is up to his neck in this. He was pulling the strings behind the scenes while the members of Falkirk West were totally oblivious.
"John had no choice but to give into Matheson's demands."
A Falkirk SNP source said: 'This whole situation stinks. It should be ordinary members – not backroom deals – that decide the future of our party. Once again, we call for full transparency and a re-run of the contest.'
An SNP spokesperson said: 'These allegations are nonsense.'
The Falkirk South branch wrote to the SNP's national executive committee last week, warning the 'legitimacy' of the selection process was under threat following Mr Giugliano's removal.
The branch said Mr Giugliano was ahead of the other three candidates in the ballot, but it was revealed that Gary Bouse would seek election in the seat last week.
Following the selection row, the SNP's national secretary Alex Kerr wrote to members over the concerns.
He warned anyone "perpetrating the myth" that Mr Giugliano was blocked because of a 'stich up' had "most likely breached the Member Code of Conduct themselves".
Those who cannot accept the rules, he added, "need to reconsider whether they can be a member of an organisation that acts for all of its members, and not just for those that we have personal regard".
Michael Matheson (Image: Jane Barlow) A bitter feud between Mr Giugliano and Mr Matheson has rumbled on for more than a year, with the current MSP backing a rival over Mr Giugliano in the Westminster selection process.
After Mr Giugliano won the selection battle in 2023, a complaint was made to SNP HQ about his campaign.
The complaint accused him of placing undue pressure on local members to support him – however he was cleared of all allegations weeks later.
After Mr Giugliano failed to be elected in July 2024, he blamed the SNP's handling of the scandal involving Mr Matheson.
He wrote on Facebook: 'An MSP found to have breached rules on parliamentary expenses must never again be protected - quite the opposite, they must be removed from office.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
South Wales Argus
37 minutes ago
- South Wales Argus
Labour MPs in call for benefits U-turn after change to winter fuel payment cut
Ms Reeves' £1.25 billion plan unveiled on Monday will see automatic payments worth up to £300 given to pensioners with an income less than £35,000 a year. It followed last year's decision to strip pensioners of the previously universal scheme, unless they claimed certain benefits, such as pension credit. Nadia Whittome, the Labour MP for Nottingham East, warned ministers they risked making a 'similar mistake' if they tighten the eligibility criteria for personal independence payments, known as Pip. Leeds East MP Richard Burgon called on pensions minister Torsten Bell to 'listen now' so that backbenchers can help the Government 'get it right'. In her warning, Ms Whittome said she was not asking Mr Bell 'to keep the status quo or not to support people into work' and added: 'I'm simply asking him not to cut disabled people's benefits.' Nadia Whittome (James Manning/PA) The pensions minister, who works in both the Treasury and Department for Work and Pensions, replied that the numbers of people receiving Pip is set to 'continue to grow every single year in the years ahead, after the changes set out by this Government'. In its Pathways to Work green paper, the Government proposed a new eligibility requirement, so Pip claimants must score a minimum of four points on one daily living activity, such as preparing food, washing and bathing, using the toilet or reading, to receive the daily living element of the benefit. 'This means that people who only score the lowest points on each of the Pip daily living activities will lose their entitlement in future,' the document noted. Mr Burgon told the Commons: 'As a Labour MP who voted against the winter fuel payment cuts, I very much welcome this change in position, but can I urge the minister and the Government to learn the lessons of this and one of the lessons is, listen to backbenchers? 'If the minister and the Government listen to backbenchers, that can help the Government get it right, help the Government avoid getting it wrong, and so what we don't want is to be here in a year or two's time with a minister sent to the despatch box after not listening to backbenchers on disability benefit cuts, making another U-turn again.' Mr Bell replied that it was 'important to listen to backbenchers, to frontbenchers'. Opposition MPs cheered when the minister added: 'It's even important to listen to members opposite on occasion.' Liberal Democrat MP Mike Martin warned that 'judging by the questions from his own backbenchers, it seems that we're going to have further U-turns on Pip and on the two-child benefit cap'. The Tunbridge Wells MP asked Mr Bell: 'To save his colleagues anguish, will he let us know now when those U-turns are coming?' The minister replied: 'What Labour MPs want to see is a Labour Government bringing down child poverty, and that's what we're going to do 'What Labour MPs want to see is a Government that can take the responsible decisions, including difficult ones on tax and on means testing the winter fuel payment so that we can invest in public services and turn around the disgrace that has become Britain's public realm for far too long.' Conservative former work and pensions secretary Esther McVey had earlier asked whether the Chancellor, 'now that she and the Government have got a taste for climbdowns', would 'reverse the equally ridiculous national insurance contribution (Nic) rises, which is destroying jobs, and the inheritance tax changes, which is destroying farms and family businesses'. Mr Bell said: 'This is a party opposite that has learned no lessons whatsoever, that thinks it can come to this chamber, call for more spending, oppose every tax rise and expect to ever be taken seriously again – they will not.' Labour MP Rebecca Long-Bailey pressed the Government to make changes to the two-child benefit cap, which means most parents cannot claim for more than two children. 'It's the right thing to do to lift pensioners out of poverty, and I'm sure that both he and the Chancellor also agree that it's right to lift children out of poverty,' the Salford MP told the Commons. 'So can he reassure this House that he and the Chancellor are doing all they can to outline plans to lift the two-child cap on universal credit as soon as possible?' Mr Bell replied: 'All levers to reduce child poverty are on the table. 'The child poverty strategy will be published in the autumn.' He added: 'If we look at who is struggling most, having to turn off their heating, it is actually younger families with children that are struggling with that. 'So she's absolutely right to raise this issue, it is one of the core purposes of this Government, we cannot carry on with a situation where large families, huge percentages of them, are in poverty.'
The National
an hour ago
- The National
Labour are still in deep trouble despite by-election win
FOR a man whose party had just won a by-election, it was widely expected to lose, Anas Sarwar is not at all a happy bunny. His aggressive and angrily needy behaviour while being interviewed by Martin Geissler on the BBC Scotland Sunday Show will remind fans of RuPaul's Drag Race of the iconic droll comment made by contestant Trixie Mattell when a competitor had a very public and furious temper tantrum after being put through to the next round by the judges but failing to make the top three: "I think that's a lot of emotion for safe." For those not familiar with the show, the comment was a pointed reference to the fact that although the contestant in question had survived that particular episode, the temper tantrum was due to their awareness that they were not on track to win the contest, and as it transpired, they were eliminated not long afterwards. Likewise, the anger displayed by Anas Sarwar was due to his awareness that despite this by-election win, his party remains in deep, deep, trouble, and that trouble is largely of Labour's own creation. Whatever you might think of the SNP's decision to focus its attacks on Reform UK during the by election campaign - and spoiler alert I think it was tactically a disaster - it's pretty rich of Anas Sarwar to go on the BBC, of all media platforms, and accuse John Swinney of running a "dishonest and disgraceful" campaign which pushed voters to Reform UK. Rarely has psychological projection been so manifest in a political interview. READ MORE: Scotland's top doctor warns of climate and pollution public health emergency It doesn't push voters to Reform when you do as the SNP has done and complain loudly that Reform is running an overtly racist campaign. What pushes voters to Reform is when you do what the Labour party and the BBC have been doing, which is to ape Reform's policies, thus legitimising and mainstreaming them, and to give Reform's leader a platform out of all proportion to his political success. The rise of Reform has nothing to do with the SNP, and everything to do with the Labour and Conservative parties and the anti-independence British media, above all the BBC. Of course, Anas Sarwar knows that, he's not a stupid man. He is, however, a politically dishonest man. The very last thing he can do in public is to admit the responsibility of his own party or that of a publicly owned broadcaster to which his party is linked by an umbilical cord in facilitating , encouraging and normalising racist far-right Anglo-British nationalism. Blaming far-right Anglo-British nationalism on the SNP is a new low, even by the base standards of the Labour Party in Scotland. Talking of pandering to the far right, the BBC has revealed that it has drawn up plans to "regain the trust" of Reform UK voters. The plans reportedly include changing news and drama content in order to make the broadcaster's output more appealing to the kind of people who have no problem at all with Doctor Who being a shape shifting near immortal alien who can cross time and space while fighting all sorts of trans-dimensional alien threats and sentient dinosaurs, but who complain it becomes unbelievable when the Doctor regenerates into a woman or a gay black Scotsman. Minutes of a meeting of the BBC's Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee in March, which has been seen by Byline Times, show that BBC News CEO Deborah Turness gave a presentation in which she discussed plans to alter 'story selection' and 'other types of output, such as drama' in order to win back the trust of Reform voters. One of the key members of the BBC's Editorial Guidelines Committee is former GB News executive Robbie Gibb, an arch-Brextremist who was appointed to the board by Boris Johnson in 2021. In 2022, former BBC presenter Emily Maitlis described Gibb as an 'active agent of the Conservative party.' Gibb was Theresa May's Downing Street Director of Communications between 2017 and 2019. (Image: House of Lords) Expect more news reports on immigration and greater prominence given to uncritical coverage of Reform UK politicians. They should just go the whole hog and rebrand BBC Question Time as 'An Evening with Nigel Farage'. Gibb was also previously the director of The Jewish Chronicle. Gibb fronted a consortium of worthies who 'rescued' the paper in 2020, but who claim either not to know, or are not saying, who put up the cash. In his November 2023 BBC Declaration of Personal Interests, Gibb stated that he was the 100 per cent owner of the Jewish Chronicle. After Gibbs' departure in August 2024, the newspaper was forced to apologise for publishing a series of fabricated pro-Israeli stories about the Gaza war. In drama, you can now look forward to cosy murders set in English country villages where everyone is white and heterosexual, and period dramas about a plucky colonial doctor, who repeatedly references how Scottish he is despite his upper class English accent, serving in one of the British Empire's African possessions, where over the course of a six episode story arc he rescues the benighted natives from their pagan superstitions and Arab slave raiders and eventually succeeds in winning the heart of a beautiful English rose, the daughter of a wealthy duke who heads a household of forelock tugging salt of the earth servants. I should stop here in case the BBC thinks this is a story pitch. Compare and contrast, surveys have shown that the BBC has lost most public trust in Scotland, in no small measure due to the Corporation's blatantly one-sided coverage of Scotland's constitutional debate, but the BBC shows no interest in trying to win back the trust of Scotland's independence-supporting viewers and listeners. The reason for that is that, despite his constant claims to be 'anti-elite,' Farage and his ilk pose no threat at all to the British establishment, they are merely the latest iteration of that establishment's attempts to subvert and control impulses to push back against it.
The National
an hour ago
- The National
Groundhog Day as John Swinney tries to justify SNP's failed strategy
Trying to claim defeat in Hamilton as some sort of improvement from the disastrous Westminster election defeat is beyond parody. John Swinney was all over the by-election in Hamilton – he has to take the blame for ignoring the campaign wishes of the local SNP members, and focusing instead on Reform while letting Labour slip through the middle. READ MORE: Activists question John Swinney's independence strategy after by-election loss Let's be clear: Labour had a rubbish candidate and campaign but still out-polled the SNP. Yet again support for independence far outstrips support for the SNP – why? Is it because everyone can see that under Swinney there is no hope for independence with the SNP? Even former MSP/ MP/leadership lackey Anne McLaughlin is claiming online that the SNP can't campaign on independence as the party has no plan on how to achieve it! That should wake up SNP members that this party is going nowhere under Swinney. We are getting a repeat performance of his last failed attempt at leadership. Swinney hasn't learnt the lessons of why he lost in 2003 – so I don't hold out much hope of any review of this latest by-election failure. Until Swinney – or a capable leader – brings forward plans for independence then the SNP is just another centrist party like any of the London-led parties. It's time for a real change in the SNP, not a retread of Swinney's tired old campaigning nonsense. Alex Beckett Paisley DIDN'T Stan Grodynski nail it on the head (Letters, Jun 8)? My only reservation is that I have scant faith this SNP party leadership will heed his message. I hope I'm wrong, because there's still time to kick the necessary action into gear before the 2026 election, which really is the party's last-chance saloon. But we'd need to see the Scottish Government attacking Westminster policy where it acts against Scottish interests. We'd need to see the blame for perceived policy failures in Scotland laid at Westminster's door, where real responsibility lies. Remember that we are where we are after more than 300 years of English rule, not just the 18 years of SNP government that Starmer likes to ram down our throats at PMQs in protection of his establishment exploiting us. READ MORE: Do the SNP no longer have a strategy for gaining independence? We'd need to show the funding limitations of the Barnett formula, which leave us having having to make choices between rather than for Scotland's needs. We'd need to trumpet the party's success areas and remind Scottish voters of the many benefits the party has delivered in their years of government, which are limited by devolution. And we'd need to highly the many areas on which we differ in cultural and political outlook: weapons of mass destruction, nuclear power, the EU, supporting genocide in Gaza, global trade, human rights, immigration, poverty, drugs, equality of opportunity, and equality generally, ambition for future prosperity, and more. There are so many generally held areas of difference. We need to reinforce that none of the three main right-wing Unionist parties can truly serve the interests of Scots, they merely wish to maintain the Union's exploitation of us. READ MORE: What is the rationale behind the SNP's 'wheesht about indy' stance? We need to attack the Union status quo with a vengeance, diligently all the way to the 2026 election. The SNP need to engage with the wider movement and make it the irrefutable de facto referendum that the democracy-denying Starmer-led Labour government denies us, in flagrant breach of our fundamental rights as the historic nation we are, and supposedly in partnership within the UK union, rather than the colonised territory that binds us to England's domination. The clock is ticking. Let's hope Stan's party is settling into its starting blocks, the starting gun poised for firing. Let's get the campaign going with that bang! Jim Taylor Scotland I CALLED it in this paper some time ago. 'Lessons will be learned'. This was the cry from the hapless Angus Robertson, soon followed by others. Well, I know someone who has already learned a lesson. ME. I did not think the result would bother me either way, but after thinking on it I came to a sorry conclusion. The SNP have taken away from me my dream of an independent Scotland in my lifetime. Their performance in this week's vote was lacklustre to say the least. How does it feel to lose to an Invisible Man? To me it feels like a betrayal of all I thought the SNP was. Everybody, including the head yins in the SNP, knows the reason for the defeat. It is the same reason we have had to put up with since 2014. No action on independence. READ MORE: SNP must turn support for independence into 'real political action', says Swinney Before you say 'Old John has thrown his toys out of the pram', let me assure you that is not the case. I have thrown the pram away with the toys in it! I have decided that I will not be banging my head against a brick wall any more. I am doing a Mhairi Black and giving politics a miss. Until there is a change of leadership in the SNP and a rock-solid commitment on independence, I am taking a Sabbatical. I am so upset that I feel the very heart and soul have been ripped from me. If all of you out there are happy just to carry on like this, then I am happy for you! We might as well call an election and get it over with because 2026 is not going to be pretty. A Unionist government awaits us in Holyrood. The SNP are quite happy to trundle along and ask us to vote for them at elections. They just want to play nice politics and hope for a referendum being given to us by Westminster. Well, I've had enough of all their weasel words. The SNP have no desire to make any progress on independence. If they had, then the promise of 2026 being a defining moment would have got us over the line on Thursday. But no, more of the same and look where it got us. Humiliated. I would like to thank The National for all the letters of mine that have been printed and wish all of you who support independence good luck. With this lot in charge of the SNP, you are going to need a lot more than luck! I may return one day when things are different, but at my time of life that is unlikely. I have been worn down by a party that was formed on the bedrock of Scottish independence. It is now a very pale imitation of that! Thank you all. Old John Ayrshire
