SCOTTISH Labour leader Anas Sarwar has insisted he is  “absolutely tough enough” to deal with Nicola Sturgeon.

The privately-educated millionaire’s son said of the First Minister: “I can take her on.” 

The Glasgow list MSP is standing against Ms Sturgeon in her Glasgow Southside seat as well as trying to overtake the Tories to make Labour the opposition at Holyrood.

In an interview with Sky News, Mr Sarwar was asked: “Do you think you’re tough enough to take on Nicola Sturgeon … If it comes down to it, can you take her on?”

He replied: “Absolutely I can take her on and I’m standing directly in her own constituency as a demonstration of that.

“I don’t want to take her on in the way that previous politicians want to take people on, which is shouting, getting angry, I think our politics deserves better than that.”

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Later, on the BBC’S Andrew Marr Show, Mr Sarwar said voters deserved a parliament that was not obsessed with SNP “psychodrama” and blamed Westminster for all its failures.

Bemoaning the “political bubble” obsession about another independence referendum, he said the public actually wanted politicians to focus on the recovery from the pandemic.

He said: “We’re voting for our parliament, so what people are voting for is what they want the priorities to be for the next five years of our parliament.

“The case I’m making is: let’s focus on the next five years, on coming through this most difficult year of our collective lifetime, this collective trauma of Covid and not go back.

“Let’s instead go forward and let’s focus on the economic recovery, focus on getting our kids back to school and their mental health, focus on all the cancer catch-up we need, and the mental health catch-up that we need, focus on making sure people have work and jobs to go back to after this crisis.”

Asked if an SNP majority would be a mandate for Indyref2, Mr Sarwar replied: “I’ve got 11 days to try and persuade people across Scotland that we can choose something different.

“We can choose to not have the next five years being about an Nicola Sturgeon and Boris Johnson fight. It doesn’t have to be about the constitution, it can be about you, your family, and our national recovery.”

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He added: “Both the SNP and the Tories play up on each other’s division.

“We have had 14 years of an SNP government, Nicola Sturgeon has been First Minister for seven years, and there has been failure after failure.

“But every time there’s a failure, what they do is say: ‘it wouldn’t have have happened if we had independence’.

“Or, worse yet, they point at the Tories and say: ‘at least we’re not as bad as that lot’.

“Frankly, I think Scotland deserves better than that, it needs a better government and we need better opposition.”