Brendan O'Hara has been MP for Argyll, Bute and South Lochaber since 2024 (under previous boundaries, Argyll and Bute from 2015). Before politics he worked as a television producer and director, mostly in Scottish broadcasting. He is one of the longer serving SNP MPs in Westminster, having survived the 2024 election that wiped out most of his party's parliamentary representation.

The SNP's 2024 collapse is the structural context for everything about his current position. The party went from 48 seats to nine. Years of accumulated mismanagement at Holyrood, the police investigations connected to former leadership figures, the loss of policy momentum on independence and the wider Scottish Labour recovery combined to produce one of the largest single party collapses of any recent UK election. O'Hara is one of the few SNP MPs left to make the case for what Scottish nationalism is for in this parliament.

His policy interests have stayed consistent across his time in Westminster. Defence procurement, foreign affairs, Scottish constitutional questions, human rights. He chaired the SNP's defence team and spoke substantively on the Trident question, on procurement transparency and on the long running issues around UK military operations abroad. The defence brief is the area where his work has been most operationally credible.

His foreign policy positioning has been clearer than most of the wider parliamentary party on a series of issues, including Yemen, Gaza and the post 2014 Russian situation. Whether that translates into political reach beyond his own constituency depends on whether Scottish voters continue to see foreign policy as a question Westminster MPs can have any influence on, which is doubtful.

The wider question about Scottish nationalism in 2026 is the one his career now sits inside. The independence project is politically dormant. The SNP has had to retreat from its earlier positioning that another referendum was imminent. The constitutional argument has not gone away but the political capacity to advance it has. O'Hara and the small remaining SNP Westminster group are now operating as a pressure group party rather than a serious challenger for national power.

His public manner is calm and articulate. He has avoided the personality politics theatrics that consumed parts of his own party during the leadership transitions. He is one of the more measured voices in a parliamentary group that has historically had its share of louder figures.

The standing critique of SNP politics applies to him in modified form. The party has been better at articulating Scottish grievance than at producing the costed governing case for independence that the harder questions demand. Currency, pensions, fiscal transfer, trade with England. The arithmetic remains difficult and the answers remain thinner than the rhetoric. That is not unique to the SNP, but the party has spent twenty years saying it is on the verge of solving it, and the political patience for that posture is thinning.

He is one of the more substantive SNP voices still in Westminster. Whether his party rebuilds from the 2024 collapse or settles into a smaller political role will partly depend on whether figures like him produce the policy work that the campaign rhetoric has so far avoided.