Monica Lennon has not ruled out a leadership bid for Scottish Labour after Anas Sarwar's impending resignation, expressing gratitude for support from party members.
London, United Kingdom Jul 23, 2026 ALN: Monica Lennon has refused to rule out standing to succeed Anas Sarwar as Scottish Labour leader, saying she has been contacted by party figures encouraging her to enter the contest.
The former MSP is expected to return to Holyrood when Mr. Sarwar resigns his Glasgow regional seat to join Andy Burnham’s UK Government.
Mr. Sarwar is expected to resign as Scottish Labour leader and is set to enter the House of Lords, allowing him to become trade minister in the revamped Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade.
As members of the Scottish Parliament cannot also sit at Westminster, he will leave Holyrood just months after being re-elected. There will be no by-election, with the vacancy instead expected to be filled by the next Scottish Labour candidate on the Glasgow regional list, who is Ms. Lennon.
Asked about whether she would stand for Labour leadership, Ms. Lennon told the Daily Record: “I am not going to rule myself out of anything right now. I want to respect other colleagues and hear what they have to say.”
Asked whether members had contacted her about standing, she said: “Yes - this has all been happening quite quickly.”
“Lots of people have been getting in touch, including today, which is very kind and I am very flattered.”
Her intervention came less than a day after it emerged Mr. Sarwar would resign as Scottish Labour leader, take a seat in the House of Lords, and become a minister in the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade.
Ms. Lennon said she would embrace the opportunity to return to the Scottish Parliament.
She said: “It would be a huge honour and privilege to go back to Parliament and serve as a member for Glasgow.”
“If I had the opportunity to go back to Parliament, I would absolutely welcome that.”
Her comments follow an interview with The Herald just hours before reports of Mr. Sarwar’s departure emerged on Tuesday.
During that conversation, Ms. Lennon disclosed that the Scottish Labour leader had “been down in London in recent days” and said “he wants to work really closely with Andy Burnham.”
There is no suggestion Ms. Lennon knew Mr. Sarwar was preparing to accept a peerage and ministerial appointment.
However, her comments now shed further light on the discussions taking place between senior Scottish Labour figures and the new Prime Minister before the move became public.
Ms. Lennon also argued that Mr. Sarwar and other senior figures responsible for Scottish Labour’s catastrophic Holyrood campaign should remain accountable for the defeat.
She previously told The Herald: “I don't think Anas, Jackie, Douglas are trying to you know absolve themselves of any responsibility. So the fact that they're still in these positions, that also means that they'll be held to account.”
Mr. Sarwar’s departure means he will leave before the party’s formal review of its worst-ever Holyrood result has reached its conclusions.
In the May election, Labour lost four seats and tied with Reform UK on 17 MSPs.
Mr. Sarwar rejected calls to stand down after the defeat, saying it was his “responsibility” to hold Scottish Labour together. His move to the Lords has therefore opened him to accusations that he is leaving before overseeing the promised rebuilding effort.
His move is also a dramatic reversal of the position he set out during the election campaign.
Asked by The Herald in May whether he would accept a place in the House of Lords if Labour lost, he replied: “No - I’m focused on being First Minister of this great country.”
Mr. Sarwar had also previously called for the House of Lords to be abolished and replaced with an elected institution.
He played a prominent role in the downfall of Sir Keir Starmer, becoming the first senior Labour figure to call publicly for him to resign during the Peter Mandelson controversy. The intervention caused relations between Scottish Labour and the UK leadership to fracture during the Holyrood campaign.
Ms. Lennon lost her seat as Labour’s representation fell from 22 MSPs to 17, but indicated in her interview with The Herald that the defeat had not diminished her political ambitions.
Asked whether she remained an active Labour member, she replied: “Of course, yeah.”
She added: “If anything, losing my seat has probably made me think about politics even more because the issues facing the country are so enormous.”
Ms. Lennon has now begun to sketch out what could become the political argument behind a leadership campaign.
She told the Daily Record: “The next phase for Scottish Labour needs to be getting back to reasserting who Scottish Labour is for, why we even exist and who it is we are trying to help.”
Speaking to The Herald a day before, she warned that Mr. Burnham’s arrival must not simply shift the UK Government’s political centre of gravity from one city to another.
She said: “We need to be careful that we don't just shift from being perhaps London centric to Manchester centric.”
Ms. Lennon added that Scotland must not become “a footnote” in the Burnham government - a warning likely to resonate as Scottish Labour prepares to choose a new leader while Mr. Sarwar leaves Holyrood for Westminster.
First Minister John Swinney described Mr. Sarwar’s appointment following Labour’s record defeat as a “terrible look” for Mr. Burnham.
He said giving Mr. Sarwar a peerage and government job was “a very, very strange way of trying to rebuild confidence of the public in politics.”
Scottish Green co-leader Gillian Mackay pointed to Mr. Sarwar’s past opposition to the House of Lords, saying: “Anas Sarwar is a chancer.
“He has gone from promising to scrap the House of Lords to taking a seat in it.
“He has spent years attacking the very institution he is now preparing to join. The hypocrisy is breath-taking.
“If he cannot stand by his most basic political principles when power is on offer, why should anyone believe a word he says about anything else?
“By grabbing a place on the unelected red benches, he’s ensured that he gets all of the power and privilege without having to worry about what voters might think.”
Reform UK Scotland’s deputy leader Thomas Kerr pushed for transparency on when Mr. Sarwar was offered the role and if his previous call for Sir Keir Starmer to step down had led to the offer.
“During the Scottish Labour leadership debate, Sarwar said he did not want to go to the House of Lords,” he said.
“Not so long ago, he also went as far as to say that Labour would abolish it. Yet now, just 76 days after asking voters to elect him to Holyrood, he is walking away.
“Anas Sarwar cannot walk away after 76 days and expect these questions to disappear.
“He asked people to trust him. He asked them to elect him. He made commitments about his future. Now he has abandoned that responsibility almost as quickly as he took it on.
“The timeline, the circumstances and the decisions behind his departure must be made public.”
While Scottish Tory deputy leader Rachael Hamilton said: “Anas Sarwar repeatedly told Scots his only focus was serving Scotland and becoming First Minister.
“Now, if these reports are confirmed, he’s walking away from that pledge for a peerage and a ministerial job in Westminster.
“Given he was one of the loudest voices calling for Keir Starmer to go, people will inevitably ask whether he always had one eye on a role at Westminster.
“Scottish voters will rightly feel they’ve been let down by yet another Labour broken promise.”
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