Kate Forbes’s announcement on Monday that she would be standing down as an MSP next year caught most people – her political allies, former backers, current colleagues – by surprise. She decided to make her intentions clear a few days prior to her attendance at the Edinburgh Fringe festival, where she was set to be interviewed by the Herald newspaper. But the timing of the Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch MSP’s exit news also coincided, incidentally, with Storm Floris hitting the UK. ‘At about 11 a.m., just after making the news, the power went off completely,’ she confessed to Thursday’s audience.
The Wi-Fi broke, a mobile phone mast went down, and there was no 4G and no mobile connectivity at all. And despite going from my office back home to see if things were any better, I was totally cut off from about 11 a.m. and had no idea how anybody had responded to the news until 8 a.m. the next morning – which is quite blissful.
Would Forbes back a Blackford bounce-back? ‘I will wait and see what the options are,’ she replied, pointedly refusing to endorse him
The poor signal may have shielded Forbes from all those eyebrows raised at the timing of her announcement. As I wrote earlier this week, she was on the SNP’s finalised candidate list – published in May – and had been expected to run for the party leadership down the line. Currently she is Deputy First Minister, as well as being cabinet secretary for the economy and Gaelic. Forbes says that it was a recent trip to India that solidified feelings she’d been having for some time. While there, she visited an orphanage with her family. ‘I just was so overwhelmed at the realisation that these kids, these really precious kids, didn’t have something but my daughter did have,’ the Highland politician explained, ‘and that my absence from home so often was a serious matter.’ She went on:
I realised that in voluntarily signing up for another five years, I was choosing to essentially say goodbye to her every Monday morning and say hello again, hopefully on a Friday night – on a good week – sometimes on a Saturday night and sometimes leaving on a Sunday night. And I just didn’t have the heart to do that for another five years.
The Deputy First Minister is adamant that this was the primary motivation behind her move. ‘I am not a quitter,’ she told the crowd fiercely, three times over. The polls suggest Forbes would win her seat next year if she contested it and, as the Skye MSP notes, she has managed to juggle a number of different priorities over the last few years. Some nationalists have suggested that former Westminster group leader (and Nicola Sturgeon ally) Ian Blackford could use this opportunity to make his political comeback – after all, his Westminster constituency of Ross, Skye and Lochaber overlapped with Kate’s Holyrood one. Would Forbes back a Blackford bounce-back? ‘I am taking those headlines with a huge dose of salt,’ she laughed. ‘I did have a chat with him a few days ago and that wasn’t in the conversation.’ Would she vote for him? ‘I will wait and see what the options are,’ she replied, pointedly refusing to endorse him.
After Sturgeon resigned in 2023, Forbes ran to replace her as a pro-business, pro-growth SNP leader. Her campaign started strong but began to crumble after she was a little too honest about her religious beliefs. Her admission that she is not in favour of gay marriage or abortion saw many of her own campaigners step away from the contest and some of her public backers disavow her. She came a close second to Humza Yousaf, who had a tumultuous premiership before SNP veteran John Swinney took the reins.
Another leadership contest is expected in the next few years and Forbes had been touted as a likely contender. The other two names in the hat include current Westminster group leader Stephen Flynn and Holyrood housing secretary – and Sturgeonite favourite – Màiri McAllan. Pollster John Curtice suggested that Forbes’s departure from the parliamentary party would pave the way for a Flynn victory – but who would Forbes prefer, a journalist quizzed her. ‘I think I question the premise in the first place,’ the MSP retorted.
She has been criticised over her views – stemming from her faith – on culture war issues like trans rights and abortion by political opponents and those in her own party. But after a decade in frontline politics, what does Forbes want her legacy to be? ‘Can I say how brilliant the result of freedom of speech in this country is?’ she told her crowd. ‘One of the antidotes to that hatred I talked about earlier is to create spaces where people can openly, without fear, respect one another.’ Describing how her colleagues in the Chamber have praised her ability to communicate and disagree with respect, she added:
In politics we keep forgetting that disagreement is the source of debate. Debate is the lifeblood of our politics and our democracy. You cannot have democracy if you don’t have at least two people who disagree with one another. And I love disagreeing.
One of those clapping especially hard at Forbes’s speech was former SNP MP Joanna Cherry, who herself has faced abuse from those within her own party over her gender-critical beliefs. Cherry – who actually backed Kate’s rival Ash Regan during the 2023 leadership contest – revealed at an earlier Fringe event that she will publish memoirs of her own (as Sturgeon prepares for her book launch next week) that, she claims, will set the record straight about the machinations of the SNP. Like Forbes, she has come under pressure from colleagues to keep quiet – or quit – over the views she has, and like Forbes, she refused to do so. It has come at a price, as the Deputy First Minister noted during her reflections on how social media has impacted politics. ‘I often reflect on just how much more toxic and brutal that is even in the last few years, and even the extent to which online abuse spills out into real life abuse,’ she said, pointing to the nastier aspects of the job that she believes stop good people from standing.
While Cherry has returned to a career in law, Forbes isn’t sure what the future holds for her yet. At just 35-years-old she has time to leave frontline politics and, if she wishes, return to it in the future. In the short term, however, her ambitions are mixed. ‘I could come up with lots of ideas that I’ve had,’ she laughed. ‘Like opening a bread shop – but that’s pretty high in the sky.’
Comments