Is ‘Operation stop Kate Forbes’ working?

The SNP establishment – the Sturgeonites – are trying to give the SNP membership an offer they can’t refuse. Swallow your doubts and just vote as you are told: that is, for Humza Yousaf. If you don’t, beware the consequences: a split in the party, the collapse of the Green coalition, the departure of key figures and even the loss of government itself.

A number of ministers, including Nicola Sturgeon’s closest ally, social justice secretary, Shona Robison, are saying they would have trouble serving in a government led by Kate Forbes. In other words, if Humza loses they’ll take their support away. 

Nationalists like the former SNP minister, Marco Biagi, have been ramping up the warnings about a split on social media. Biagi has even suggested that the Scottish parliament might fail to endorse Kate Forbes as First Minister of Scotland because of MSPs’ revulsion at her views on gay marriage and abortion. It’s a new SNP version of Project Fear. Après Kate, le déluge.

The likelihood of the SNP government falling, and precipitating an early election, is vanishingly small however. It seems inconceivable the Greens would vote for a Tory First Minister or use their MSPs’ votes in such a way as to help install the opposition leader, Scottish Conservative Douglas Ross, in Bute House. But after last night’s Sky News debate, in which Kate Forbes again looked and sounded more First Ministerial than Humza Yousaf, the ‘continuity faction’ appears to be pulling out all the stops. 

The disintegration of the SNP-Green coalition is a more plausible outcome of a Forbes victory on Monday 27 March. Her opposition to the Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill, and her ‘misgendering’ the trans rapist, Isla Bryson, would alone be enough to ensure that the Green ministers, Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater, would ‘walk’. Harvie says SNP backing for the GRR Bill as it stands is the Green’s ‘red line’. Forbes’ support for the oil and gas industry in the North Sea could also be a deal breaker in any renegotiation of the Bute House Agreement. She seems fairly relaxed about running a minority government, as Alex Salmond did with some success after 2007.

It’s hard to know what the SNP membership make of these threats. Some take exception to the suggestion that ministers might refuse to endorse the wishes of the membership as expressed in a free and democratic vote. Project ‘Stop Kate’ has echoes of the attempts by Labour front benchers to prevent Jeremy Corbyn becoming Labour leader in 2016. In that case, the ‘chicken coup’ (as it was known) failed and Jezza took over as leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition. It might be that the SNP membership is similarly indifferent to threats to bring the house down. 

Then again it may be that SNP members, who have always made a fetish of party unity, may regard Forbes as something of a traitor to the cause by implicitly criticising Nicola Sturgeon. Her mantra that ‘continuity won’t cut it’ and that the SNP must make a break with the ‘mediocrity’ of the past looks like a pretty negative verdict on the legacy of the SNP’s most electorally successful leader. Sturgeon has won, as she regularly reminds us, the last eight elections.

Humza Yousaf thinks he’s a winner too and last night claimed he now has a 19 per cent lead over Kate Forbes in the Sky News-commissioned YouGov poll. The nationalists polling expert, James Kelly, says that this should be regarded as untrue. As far as I could see from the raw data, Humza Yousaf has a seven per cent lead over Kate Forbes when SNP voters were asked who would be a good or bad FM. But only five per cent thought he would be a better First Minister than Nicola Sturgeon against ten per cent who said Forbes would be. Moreover, as Forbes repeatedly reminded the Health Secretary, she consistently comes top in polls of Scottish voters as a whole. 

So SNP members face a bewildering choice. Should they back a glib politician with a chequered ministerial career (who seems unpopular with Scottish voters) or an unreconstructed social conservative who rejects gay marriage and abortion and is opposed by almost every senior SNP politician from the deputy leader, John Swinney, down?

We can probably rule out the third option, Ash Regan. She showed her inexperience by failing to explain clearly the financial institutions Scotland would require to establish an independent currency. That was left-field from Sky presenter, Beth Rigby, perhaps, but a line of questioning Regan should have been able to cope with given her foregrounding of her currency plans. 

Rigby challenged Kate Forbes almost exclusively on the relatively abstruse issue of gay conversion therapy. Forbes insisted that she believes that any attempt to coerce gay people into becoming heterosexual is ‘abhorrent’. She did not however state clearly that she would ban gay people voluntarily choosing to undergo such therapy – though I’m not sure that will sway many voters either way. But Humza Yousaf said her answer confirmed his claim to be the sole guardian of the SNP’s ‘progressive agenda’. 

This is probably the key to the leadership election. Just how liberal are SNP members? We know they are mostly over 50 and probably tend to the left. We also know that it’s likely many of those members opposed to the gender bill have left the party by now, possibly for Alex Salmond’s Alba party. Estimates of the SNP’s current membership are as low as 78,000 – down from 120,000 five years ago. It stands to reason that they are mostly Sturgeon loyalists. 

Were I forced to make a prediction, I would for these reasons expect Humza Yousaf to edge it on results day. He has the backing of the party luminaries including Nicola Sturgeon and most MSPs. It would be extraordinary if he lost. But accidents do happen in politics and, as the bard said, the best laid schemes gang aft agley.