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Immediately rejecting the only option supported by constitutional convention
Could you provide some evidence for this? There is no constitutional convention that says the leader of a GNU should be the leader of the opposition and plenty (particularly within the 20th century) to say that it usually isn't.
ReekBlefs-
Almost by definition I would expect a leader of a GNU not to be either the prime minister or the leader of the opposition.
And +1 on providing some evidence that there’s “constitutional convention”
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There is no constitutional convention that says the leader of a GNU
There's no convention for that at all. There is for who gets to step up to the plate in the case of a vote of no confidence overturning the incumbents. Support for a GNU would bolster the case for that person being able to form a government, not the other way round.
cookiemonster
itsbruce
Immediately rejecting the only option supported by constitutional convention wasn't pragmatic. The monarch is tightly bound by these conventions. The country has been kidnapped by ideologues who will happily destroy all of that. The route out of that hole isn't yet more of the same; short of a full-on revolution, it relies on the monarch being offered a conventionally-acceptable life raft.
We may already be in the place where there isn't enough support for those conventions - either in Parliament or the country at large - to be maintained, but that kind of revolution clearly wasn't Swinson's motivation.