| In a press conference yesterday, Humza Yousaf more or less admitted how poorly he had judged the decision to end the Bute House agreement, as the coalition between the SNP and the Greens was known, last week. (For more on how it fell apart, see Severin Carrell and Libby Brooks’s explainer from last week.) “My hope was to continue working with the Greens,” he said – but added: “I clearly underestimated the level of hurt and upset my actions caused Green colleagues.” In other words, Yousaf had calculated that the Greens would continue to support him as first minister even out of coalition – necessary to keeping the government going as the SNP is in a minority at Holyrood, with 63 of 129 MSPs. Once it became clear that they would never support him again, he saw no palatable route to winning a vote of no confidence due later this week. Referring to the alternative of courting Ash Regan, who defected from the SNP to Alex Salmond’s Alba last year, he said he was “not willing to trade my values or principles”; Salmond claimed Yousaf was negotiating with Alba only yesterday morning, while the SNP claimed the conversation with Regan was merely a “courtesy” call. “Diamonds are formed under pressure,” Rory Scothorne writes in an opinion piece for the Guardian this morning. “Well, so are career-ending mistakes”. “It was a catastrophic misjudgement,” he said yesterday. “He gained nothing, and lost everything.” How did Yousaf find himself in this position? The Greens were already angry at not being consulted over a major decision to freeze council tax last year; the controversy over the gender recognition act and how it was blocked by Westminster has also been a lightning rod for disagreement. But the proximate cause of the crisis was Yousaf’s decision earlier this month to abandon the target of cutting Scottish carbon emissions by 75% by 2030. That led the Greens (who are more democratic than most parties, and whose leadership were taking an “absolute pelting” from members, Scothorne said) to call an extraordinary general meeting to decide whether they could remain in government. Rather than wait to hear back from the Greens about their view, Yousaf decided that he had to seize the initiative – and ambushed his coalition partners. “You can understand that waiting on the Greens would not have looked strong,” Scothorne said. “But it might have been done in a significantly less toxic way.” Once Green co-leaders Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater had been informed, there was little prospect of them helping to keep Yousaf in post: this piece in the Herald gives a flavour of the intensity of feeling among their membership at not even being able to leave a deal that some feel led to “the corruption of Green values” on their own terms. “The clear strategic choice for them was to go on the attack,” Scothorne said. “And while they may appear to be angry and emotional, it’s probably the smartest electoral thing, too. They’re saying: if you’re an SNP member and you’re angry about the direction of your party, we’re right here.” What are the deeper roots of the crisis? Yousaf and the SNP’s problems were not merely a matter of policy disagreements with the Greens and a botched exit strategy. The Bute House agreement was struck during the Nicola Sturgeon era, and “in the end, the trust came from a sense of her confidence”, Scothorne said. “As Yousaf’s position weakened, it became harder for the Greens to trust that he would stick with them.” In this analysis piece, Libby Brooks notes that the eventual end of the SNP’s partnership with the Greens might be traced back to the leadership contest last year, when Yousaf narrowly defeated the social conservative Kate Forbes. “The downward spiral of chaos that ended with Yousaf’s resignation little over a year later was telegraphed by the fault lines that emerged back then,” she writes. Some on the right of the party were unhappy with the deal – and since Yousaf had none of the authority that Sturgeon built up over nearly a decade, those fissures were bound to become visible, making the projection of the SNP as a broad church harder to sustain. “You might see Yousaf as the failure of continuity Sturgeon without Sturgeon herself,” Scothorne said. “It was bold to say, as they did, that we speak for the whole country in minority government – but a big part of the calculation was that she was popular enough to outweigh the risks. She, personally, was able to keep the mirage alive. Yousaf was kind of stuffed from the start.” Where does the SNP go from here? | 