Scotland’s First Minister has said he feared his party could have been “wiped out” at the general election in July.

The SNP suffered heavy losses at the ballot box in the summer, dropping from 48 seats at Westminster to just nine.

The loss capped off a torrid 18 months for the party, which included three different leaders, the dissolution of its coalition with the Scottish Greens, and a police investigation into its finances which has seen former chief executive – and Nicola Sturgeon’s husband – Peter Murrell being charged in connection with alleged embezzlement.

The conditions that I inherited, we could quite easily have been wiped out, I think

Speaking to BBC Scotland’s Podlitical programme, John Swinney said of the election result: “On the one hand, I thought ‘this could actually have been worse’, because I think we were probably heading for an even worse result.

“The conditions that I inherited, we could quite easily have been wiped out, I think.

“I don’t think it would take much for that to have happened.”

The First Minister pointed to the near wipe-out of Labour in Scotland in the 2015 and 2019 elections, which reduced the party to just one MP.

“We did it to the Labour Party, I feared it might be done to us and we avoided that,” he said.

But he described the result as a “colossal setback for the party” which he has been part of for more than 40 years.

“In a sense, it was an illustration of the challenge and the scale of the challenge that lay ahead of me, which is about rebuilding our relationship with the public, and that’s what I’ve spent the last seven-and-a-half months doing,” he added.

The First Minister refused to blame the election defeat on his predecessor Humza Yousaf, who was pushed out of office after ending the coalition with the Scottish Greens.

Mr Yousaf told the PA news agency this week he feels he is unlikely to have survived as leader had he still been in charge and repeated the same result in the July election.

Mr Swinney is now attempting to rally support for his Government’s Budget, which is due to face a final vote in late February.

The SNP does not hold a majority in Holyrood and will need to find at least two votes from other parties to pass the tax and spending plans laid out earlier this month by Finance Secretary Shona Robison.

Discussing the Budget, particularly the decision to begin work on mitigating the two-child benefit cap in Scotland, Mr Swinney said: “The SNP is back on the front foot, that’s where the SNP is.

“I had to do a lot of careful preparation, but we’re back on the front foot and we intend to stay on the front foot.”