A voice of anger and leadership
Anas Sarwar is sounding more and more like a potential First Minister.
As he went toe-to-toe with Nicola Sturgeon at First Minister’s Questions, Anas Sarwar will have felt more pressure than usual.
Peering down on him from the gallery was a distinguished guest: the Governor of Punjab, Chaudhry Mohammad Sarwar. Or ‘dad’, as he’s known to the Scottish Labour leader.
Talk about helicopter parenting. Kids think it’s embarrassing when dad shouts from the sidelines at their juniors league matches. Imagine one who flies all the way from Lahore to keep an eye on the ref.
Sarwar fils lit up the chamber with another one of his prosecutions of the First Minister on her weak spot: health. Specifically, the scandal-ridden Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow. Last week, he raised the case of Andrew Slorance, Sturgeon’s former civil servant, who died there after contracting the fungal infection Aspergillus.
His interrogation of the First Minister was praised by pundits but someone else was watching, too. ‘I was contacted by a senior clinician at the hospital,’ he told the SNP leader yesterday, ‘who revealed there was another case of Aspergillus in a child cancer patient at the same time and in the same ward as Andrew. Tragically, that child died.’
FMQs wasn’t terribly lively this week but those last four words drew all the air out of the room.
Sarwar reminded the First Minister that NHS protocol requires hospitals which discover an outbreak to file a ‘red report’ and the health board to alert the health secretary.
‘Did that happen? Was the First Minister aware of that death? What action was taken?’ Sarwar enquired, though ‘enquired’ is a generous description given his searing tone.
‘I will look into that specific issue and come back to Anas Sarwar,’ Sturgeon undertook, adding that the issues he had raised were ‘important’.
Sarwar could barely contain himself in his seat. ‘That sounds like a no,’ he spat. ‘What is the point of a Scottish Government oversight board?’
There’s no end of confected outrage in politics and Sarwar can ramp it up with the best of them but this wasn’t a put-on for the cameras. I’ve observed him for the better part of a decade, back to his days as an MP. This wasn’t fake. His anger was real. He was done.
The reason? Grimly, he wasn’t revealing to MSPs the death of one more child, but two.
He disclosed: ‘A second clinician — who is afraid to speak out because of bullying and intimidation — has told me that, in the past two months, another child acquired a waterborne infection, as Milly Main did, and died.’
There was no barracking from the SNP benches. Dead children may be the only subject still capable of shocking Holyrood out of its tedious tribalism.
'Holding answers are no longer good enough,' he warned, glaring at the First Minister. 'This is gross negligence. The First Minister must act now, stop infections and save lives.'
Sturgeon began to address the case of the second whistleblower — 'no clinician should fear bullying or intimidation in coming forward' — when Sarwar shouted 'they have been' from his seat.
'Anas Sarwar says that they have been,' she responded. 'That will not be tolerated in our National Health Service.'
She returned to the public inquiry and the importance of allowing its work to be completed, but Sarwar castigated her answer as 'unacceptable and complacent'.
'Milly Main died in 2017,' he noted of the child whose death began the scandal. 'Hiding behind process' would not 'bring people back to life or stop infections right now', he charged. The health board and the oversight board had failed — and so had she.
Here's what she should do: 'Sack the leadership of the health board today, sack the oversight board today, and use her emergency powers to take control of that hospital.'
He sounded angry and impatient and frustrated, but beyond that there was something weightier: he sounded like a First Minister.
He did the old man proud.
Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on November 26, 2021.
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I’m not a Labour voter but at this stage I’d happily take Anas Sarwar as FM in place of the dangerously incompetent narcissist, Sturgeon.