John Swinney was sworn in this morning at the Court of Session, taking the Official Oath before the Lord President and a bench of senior judges, as is the constitutional form. By the standards of Scottish political theatre the ceremony was thin: no public address from the steps, no walk-out to a crowd, no waiting party-faithful with banners on Parliament Square. The First Minister returned to Bute House for an afternoon of cabinet decisions that will define what the next four years actually look like.
The arithmetic, as set out in this column a fortnight ago, is plain. The SNP holds 58 seats, down five on the dissolution figure, and seven short of an overall majority. Labour and Reform are joint second on 17. The Greens have 15. The Liberal Democrats sit on 10. The Conservatives, at 12, are reduced and arguing publicly about who is to blame for it. A minority government on these numbers can survive a single Parliament; it cannot survive any individual budget without striking a deal with somebody, and the only somebody who shares enough of the SNP's policy agenda to make that deal cheap is the Greens.
So the question that hung over Bute House this morning was not who would be Deputy First Minister — that was settled last week — but how openly the new government intends to negotiate with Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater's successors. The Bute House Agreement of 2021–24, which collapsed in acrimony two years ago, is still the template. The political cost of signing a Mark II version, in the eyes of SNP backbenchers, is high. The fiscal cost of not signing it, in the eyes of the Finance Secretary, is higher.
The other set of questions sits on the cabinet roster itself. Swinney has had a fortnight to think about it, and the briefings to the Sunday papers over the weekend suggested a deliberate move to bring forward MSPs from the 2021 intake — those who entered Parliament with no front-bench experience and who would, in an ordinary cycle, have waited another term. The reading from those briefings was that the First Minister wants to project a generational handover without actually conceding that one is underway. Whether the post-election cabinet announcement matches the weekend's signal will be the first test of how settled his authority inside the parliamentary group really is.
A minority government on these numbers can survive a Parliament; it cannot survive a single budget without striking a deal.
On policy, the headline lines from the nomination speech were familiar. Action on the cost of living. Improvements to the NHS. Economic growth, and opportunity across Scotland. None of these are wrong. None of them, set against the backdrop of UK inflation at 2.8 per cent in April, an energy price cap forecast to climb again from July, and a Scottish Fiscal Commission outlook that has darkened on every iteration since January, are sufficient as a programme on their own. The substance will come in the cabinet's first set of decisions on the 2026–27 budget revisions, which the Finance Secretary is expected to publish before the summer recess.
One of the structural features of this Parliament that has had less attention than it deserves is the entry of 17 Reform MSPs. Reform's parliamentary group will, on day one, be larger than the Greens or the Liberal Democrats; on present indications it intends to behave less like a constructive opposition and more like a permanent rolling intervention on the SNP's right flank. For the new First Minister this is, paradoxically, a stabiliser. It guarantees that any centre-left bloc he assembles will have a numerical floor to work from, because the alternative — Reform supplying confidence votes — is not something the Labour MSPs returned on 17 seats can be seen to accept.
What of the constitution? Independence was, by the SNP's own framing, not the front-of-card issue in this campaign. It is back as a back-of-card issue this week, in the form of an apparently throwaway line in Mr Swinney's speech to the chamber on Monday in which he committed to publishing what he called a "framework for the next stage of the national conversation" before the autumn. Nobody in the press lobby took this for an announcement that a referendum is imminent. What it does signal is that the First Minister wishes to keep the strategic question alive without having to defend a date for it.
His critics inside the SNP — and there are more of them this week than there were last week, because every reduced majority generates them — will say that this is exactly the holding pattern Nicola Sturgeon kept the party in for the second half of her tenure, and that it did not end well. His defenders will say that with energy bills rising and the NHS workforce pipeline narrowing every quarter, the discipline of governing is the only available politics, and that the constitution can wait its turn. Both readings are tenable. The next twelve months will decide which one is correct.
For now, the new administration has a four-year mandate and a parliamentary majority of nothing. The Court of Session has done its part. The hard part begins this afternoon.
By Catriona MacLeod — Politics Editor at The Scottish Review. She has covered Holyrood for fourteen years.