John Swinney’s SNP are favourites to secure an outright majority in Scotland come the parliamentary election in May.

A YouGov poll just days ago put them on 67 seats – 65 are needed for a majority. It’s the second poll in a week that has them in the lead. This, in many ways, is remarkable.

When Swinney took over as leader of the SNP, and First Minister of Scotland, in May 2024, the party were in steep decline.

First, Nicola Sturgeon, the popular chief who provided a steady, matriarchal hand through the pandemic, resigned suddenly in February 2023. She became engulfed in a police investigation which led to her now ex-husband Peter Murrell, former chief executive of the SNP, facing a charge of embezzling £495,000 from the party.

Sturgeon’s successor, the likeable Humza Yousuf, proved himself wholly incapable of meeting the demands of high office.

He crashed a power-sharing agreement with the Greens, showing poor political judgement, and lasted little more than a year.

So, into the wreckage stepped Swinney, the old stager, the safe pair of hands, who had held just about every position in the SNP and many offices of state in Scotland including education, finance, deputy first minister, minister for Covid recovery. But he’d been out of the game.

When Sturgeon left, so did he. A keen runner, he took off.

He returned to a party slipping behind a resurgent Labour in the polls, with anger growing at continued perceived failures. Within weeks of taking over, the SNP lost 38 of their 47 Westminster seats.

The SNP had been in office since 2007, securing most seats in four Holyrood elections.

Judgement on failures was beginning to sound louder than any recognition of successes.

A widening attainment gap between students from affluent and least affluent areas; a growing housing emergency that saw a spike in rough sleeping and an increase in children in temporary accommodation (over 10,000 in recent numbers); a maddening slowdown in social housing building; growing NHS waiting lists; a drugs death figure that was the highest in Europe.

So how has Swinney turned this around? It’s a question many leaders, particularly those facing angry headwinds in Stormont, might ask.

There is an element of luck. UK-wide disillusionment with the Westminster Labour government has dealt heavy blows to Anas Sarwar’s leadership in Scotland.

The rise of Reform is also happening in Scotland, though it looks to be eating into Tory and Labour votes rather than SNP.

But Swinney has also faced down challenges. Allegations of major financial malfeasance at the top of a political party would normally stick to a leader, especially a veteran like Swinney who has been around for many administrations. But he has been able to move aside from the Murrell mess.

Then, there’s the issue of boats – in Scotland that means something different than in the rest of the UK.

You might have seen the rising tide of anger over the mess of ferry availability. This is a real hot button: the inability to properly build new ferries to serve the islands, and then seeing older ones coming off-stream for continued repairs, looks like terrible mismanagement of a vital part of national infrastructure.

Just three weeks ago, as we all headed towards the Easter holidays and businesses reliant on tourists were worried there would be no transportation to bring them to the islands, it looked like this could become Swinney’s kryptonite.

But he held steady, insisted things would get better, more boats would become available, and people would see the result. And they did. Not massively, but enough to show he was speaking some sort of truth.

This is at core, I believe, of the Swinney success and the thing Northern Irish leaders need.

It’s not just that he’s steady, it’s that he has focus, and he delivers. Saying something is easy. Delivery is tough. And Swinney, though a consummate politician, never looks to be simply playing politics.

When he became First Minister, Swinney said defeating child poverty was his number one objective. He looked for best practice in local authorities to roll this out nationally.

He’s pushing ahead with the Scottish Child Payment for the lowest income families. He’s gunning for the attainment gap.

He’s working on a new national affordable housing scheme – though let’s see how that goes.

He’s also canny about how he makes claims of SNP wins – free prescriptions, free university education for Scots, free bus travel for young people under 22 (the Greens might have something to say about whose idea that was).

He sticks to his guns. He called out racism in Reform. He is now talking seriously again about a new independence referendum. People, clearly, value his authenticity.

He is not a showy politician. He won’t slide down water-shoots or claim that he’s really into Dua Lipa. He looks like a grown-up who is there to get some grown-up work done.

Just over a year ago, I asked him if he was a bit annoyed that he’d taken over the SNP, after all the years as the bridesmaid, when it looked like a busted flush.

“This has come at the right moment in my life,” he said.

A lifetime of public service taught him this: “The deepest of understandings of how the public finances that underpin our public services, if they’re pointed in the right direction, can be phenomenally impactful.”

Sort the money, fix the problem. Over to you Stormont.

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