Sarwar made last-minute decision to call for Starmer's resignation

Anas Sarwar says he only made up his mind to make a dramatic call for Sir Keir Starmer to resign as prime minister on the morning of the press conference.

The Scottish Labour leader urged the UK Labour leader to stand down last month, saying "too many mistakes" had been made during Starmer's premiership.

At the time Starmer's judgement had been questioned over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US, despite his links to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Sarwar told the BBC's Scotcast podcast he slept "very well" the night before his hastily arranged speech because he "hadn't made my mind up properly" until the following day.

"I thought about it a lot," he said. "In actual fact I hadn't properly made my mind up until the morning, having slept on it, woke up, thought about it.

"I just felt as if I had to be true to myself and be true with the public. That's when the press conference was set up."

As Sarwar began his speech six weeks ago, a flurry of senior Labour ministers took to social media to express their support for the prime minister.

The Scottish Labour leader says that although he had spoken to a number of colleagues at the time, he had kept his personal views "largely to himself", insisting he was "not part of any coup or plot".

Since the resignation call, Sarwar says he has only personally spoken to the prime minister on the phone once.

Prior to this, Sarwar said very few people in politics had as close a relationship with Starmer as he did.

"I think it's safe to say that saying what I said will have hurt him," he said.

Now, he says their relationship is "difficult, but still professional".

"I do genuinely like him as a human being," he said. "I do think he is a man of decency and integrity. I do think that he wants what's best for our country.

"But I'm the one who has got to face the electorate. I've got to tell them who I am."

Sarwar also told the podcast that fielding questions from reporters about Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein had a "monumental bearing" on his decision to turn on Starmer.

"I was calling out some of the most difficult situations that many families will ever face in their lives about what's happened at the Queen Elizabeth [University Hospital in Glasgow] and I'd left the parliament and walked out of the parliament chamber and you have the press pack outside for the doorstep and every single question I got was about Mandelson," he said.

"And it made me think for a number of days about what's happening and what the situation is. And did that have a monumental bearing on my view and what I said [in calling for Starmer to quit]? Absolutely it did."

Sarwar was speaking to Scotcast as part of a series of interviews with Scotland's party leaders ahead of May's Holyrood election.

The interview will be available on BBC Sounds from 17:00.

Interviews with Scottish Liberal Democrat Alex Cole-Hamilton, Reform UK's Malcolm Offord, Scottish Green co-leader Gillian Mackay and the SNP's John Swinney are available on BBC Sounds and BBC iPlayer.

An interview with Scottish Conservative Russell Findlay is due to be published on Thursday.