NO PLOTTING, JUST HONESTY

ANAS Sarwar has revealed the moment Keir Starmer lost his confidence as Prime Minister.

- BY JOHN FERGUSON

In an exclusive interview with the Sunday Mail the Scottish Labour leader has called the "painful" decision to demand his resignation the toughest of his political career.

But Sarwar made clear he stood by his verdict on Starmer and in an apparent challenge to other senior party figures said he was unwilling to "say one thing in private and another in public".

The crunch moment came three days before the MSP's shock press conference last Monday as he left a heated First Minister's Questions session at Holyrood.

Sarwar had been pressing First Minister John Swinney on the safety scandal at Glasgow's Queen Elizabeth University Hospital believed to have claimed several lives, but left the chamber to be confronted by journalist over the Peter Mandelson furore.

He said: "I made the decision alone. I wrestled with it for a few days, it was the hardest political decision of my career, I have a close and good relationship with Keir, we have worked closely for five years, and so it was very difficult and painful.

"But if you want to lead you need to be able to take big, tough decisions and I want to be in a position, post-May 7, where I am responsible for making much bigger and more important decisions for the people of Scotland.

"The contrast that got me thinking was the preceding Thursday. I was in Parliament doing First Minister's Questions, talking about the dishonesty of the SNP and the decision they made to open a hospital that wasn't ready and all the devastation that caused the lives lost and the cover ups that followed.

"And then I left the chamber and journalists were not asking me about that, they were asking me about the Mandelson scandal.