KEZIA Dugdale has finally announced that she'll be stepping down as an MSP come the summer - and it shouldn't be much of a surprise.
The former Scottish Labour leader has had a rough old time of it in the party of late, so much so that any reference to it has slowly but surely disappeared from her Twitter profile entirely.
However, there's a real irony to the timing of the announcement that she'll be leaving the Scottish parliament to take up a position at the University of Glasgow.
Earlier this week, the Strathclyde University Labour Club ran an online "world cup" of Labour MPs and MSPs in Scotland. Twitter users voted on a series of head-to-head polls against competing politicians to nominate their favourites.
Perhaps unintentionally, the light-hearted competition revealed something a little darker about the current state of the party when both the leader Richard Leonard, and the deputy leader, were eliminated in the very first round...
Wow! What a brutal round that was! Both the Leader and the Deputy Leader are out but we've got to move on to round two, here's how the competition is looking so far! pic.twitter.com/NZQS4bAk7e
— Strathclyde University Labour Club (SULC) (@StrathLabclub) April 22, 2019
Recent polling showed that more than a third of Scottish Labour voters don't actually know who Leonard was though, so maybe that's not too surprising.
Eventually the winner was revealed to be none other than Kezia Dugdale.
The Jouker wonders what it says about Scottish Labour that its most popular MSP is leaving, while the leadership are given short shrift by the membership...
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