WI - Scottish Prime Ministers / Welsh MPs as Scottish / Welsh First Ministers

Lets say the West Lothian Question was resolved either prior or post-WW2, how would OTL Scottish Prime Ministers of the UK (along with OTL Welsh MPs who came the closest to Premiership) have fared instead as First Ministers of Scotland or Wales respectively?

The likes of Ramsey MacDonald, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown come to mind as Scottish Prime Ministers of the UK, while the Welsh MPs who came the closest to power were Nye Bevan, Neil Kinnock, Geoffrey Howe, Michael Heseltine, Michael Howard and John Prescott though am more examples exist for both Scottish and Welsh MPs.

How would Scotland and Wales have fared under their leadership?
 

GarethC

Donor
At the risk of threadcrapping, for which I apologise, the role of First Minister in either regional government is a distant second to the prize of No.10, or even the other big cabinet jobs. Politicians of ambition and ability will seek to stay in the national arena, rather than being relegated to the lower-status and lower-powered roles in Holyrood or the Bay.

I'd say we'd need to look for no-hoper junior ministers, or even backbenchers, who might have seen big-fish-in-small-pond as a realistic target for their limited abilities, unless you want to look at wider butterflies; e.g. Kinnock heads up the Welsh Assembly after losing a brutal intenecine conflict with Militant that drives centre-left politicians out of the Labour Party, in which case it's more interesting in some ways to look at who is hounded out to join the SDP, rather than who looks at shifting the deck chairs on Titanic of post-mining South Wales in a UK where Labour's lurch to the left in the 90s allows the Conservatives to lurch to the right and starve the not-voting-Tory regions of money.
 
The likes of Blair, Prescott, Heseltine and Howard were of Scottish/Welsh background, but would still generally be regarded as English. I don't think they would be considered as candidates for the assembly had there lives taken the same course as IOTL.

To throw out a few suggestions of my own, Tom Johnstone was the Scottish Secretary during WW2, and is generally held in quite high regard in the history of Scottish devolution. I could see him being an early candidate to head up a Scottish Assembly. Id say a history of advocating for devolution probably marks out a good candidate. An earlier Donald Dewar is a possibility.
 
While many of the Scottish / Welsh MPs would set their sights on No. 10 and succeed in some instances succeed, it would be interesting to how Scotland / Wales would have fared under their leadership as First Ministers compared to OTL where the policies they enact only effect Scotland / Wales as opposed to the rest of the UK.
 
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